The Signet Library was delighted to host the launch of a joint conference last week on Catalogues and Registers as Evidence in the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology in collaboration with SIGMA, IASH, the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society and the University of Edinburgh.
Delegates were welcomed by conference organiser J.P. Asher and Research Principal James Hamilton before being given a tour of the Library which ended in an exhibition drawn from Signet Library collections on the early history of the organization of human knowledge through library catalogues.
Library catalogues were among the first and most important efforts to find ways to bring order to the entire span of human knowledge. In this, the Signet Library played an important role, producing in 1805 the first real classified catalogue of a major British collection and with its later catalogues guiding Thomas Carlyle in the building of the London Library. The 1805 catalogue took its origins from the famous early catalogue of French scholar Jacques-Auguste de Thou, the Catalogus bibliothecæ Thuanæ of 1679 (a book with de Thou’s original pre-1587 armorial binding was on show) and the exhibition showed this influence passing through Scottish catalogues such as that of Writer to the Signet James Anderson (d. 1728) and the Duke of Argyll (printed privately in 1758). Also on display were bookseller’s catalogues from the seventeenth and eighteenth century and some early catalogues of some of the small private libraries that were once such a feature of Scottish rural life.
