Theatrum Anonymorum et Pseudonynorum, Ex Symbolis & Collatione Virorum Per Europam Doctissimorum Ad Celeberrrimorum, Post Syntagma Dudum Editum, Summa Beati Auctoris Cura Reclusum.

1708. Hamburg, Liebernickel, 1708. Folio. 18 ff; 726, 623, 195pp. Engraved allegorical frontispiece. Contemporary full vellum binding.

Vincent Placcius (1642-1699) was a prolific writer. The present work is the chief early work on books published anonymously or under pseudonym. It was published nine years after Placcius's death and identifies 2777 anonymous works. The engraved frontispiece shows how the learned author or editor, standing in an academic library, takes the masks from the faces of several authors and attaches them to a cord. The cord with the masks refers to "Zettelkasten" to which single slips of paper with textual quotations could be flexibly attached, facilitating sorting and storing of text. A very good copy. [cf. Petzholdt p. 102; Breslauer/Folter #70, Brunet IV,682, erroneously requiring the continuation published 32 years later, Malclès, la bibliographie pp. 48-9, Barbier I.xxxiii]. "Enormously enlarged" edition of "the first independently published bibliography of pseudonyma and anonyma" (Breslauer / Folter, Bibliography # 70, on the 1674 edition). The work dramatically expands the author's De scriptis & scriptoribus anonymis atque pseudonymis syntagma (1674), a comparatively modest effort in 4to describing 1,500 books, whereas the present title is a massive folio containnig upwards of ten thousand entries. Both were preceded by an appendix to a legal dissertaion by Friedrich Geissler (De Nominum mutatione et anonymis scriptoribus, Leipzig 1669), considered the first bibliography exclusively devoted to anonyma according to Breslauer / Folter, but noting that it was not separately issued (Bibliography # 65). The section devoted to books without authors is organized by subject, keeping to what was the hierarchical arrangement of subjects - Bibles, theology, legal, etc. - which are in turn organized according to their country of origin. The section devoted to pseudonymous authors is organized in part alphabetically. Chapter 13 (pp. 506 - 530) is devoted to English authors, and most of the subject section contain English-language or English-printed titles. The work contains an exceptionally witty engraved titlepage, often reproduced: it shows a group of men in a long library corridor, the shleves on either side teeming with large folios. A man with his back to the reader (presumably the author) removed the masks of three authors who now show their true faces; earlier masks retrieved from other discoveries have been strung on a kind of clothesline in the library, like trophies. Posthumously published, the work also contains a life of the author, as well as the brief treatises by Geisler and Deckherr. The work was continued in 1740 by Johann Christian Mylius. By training a lawyer, the Hamburg polymath Placcius (1642 - 99) wrote a number of works concerned with the problem of organizing or structuring large masses of information. He is also credited with the invention of the modern index card - as well as a fililng cbainet for organizing them -, described in his De Arte excerpendi (1689).