THE IMPORTANCE OF NUMISMATIC BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Among the Library’s most recent acquisitions is George Kolbe’s new publication, The Reference Library of a Numismatic Bookseller, which was privately printed and limited to 150 copies. Although the topic may initially seem very narrow and focused, the book is an important reference tool for numismatic researchers and reminds us of the general importance and abundance of numismatic bibliographies. Bibliographies in general are particularly important to libraries as a way of identifying relevant works and assisting researchers. Well organized bibliographies, like Kolbe’s, can be particularly useful in guiding research.

The ANS Library reference section contains more than 700 books, many of which are bibliographies, which can be as broad as Dekesel’s mammoth works (Bibliotheca Nummaria series) that aim to include all numismatic literature published by century, starting with the 16th century, to as narrow a bibliography as that of a single author, such as Carl H. Schaible’s 1952 Bibliografia de José Toribio Medina. Even the ANS Library’s online catalog, DONUM, serves as its own electronically published numismatic bibliography, containing more than 180,000 records of items in the collections, with each record containing not only location information, but essential bibliographic information that can assist any researcher.

Numismatic bibliographies have been compiled for centuries although interest really increases after the appearance of the earliest works of numismatic literature by Guillaume Bude and Andrea Fulvio in the early 16th century. The earliest book to contain a numismatic bibliography appeared in 1579, written by Antoine Le Pois. The introductory pages of his book, Discours sur les medalles et graveurs antiques, principalement romaines, include about 5 pages of bibliographic discussion that mentions other 16th century authors such as Fulvio, Erizzo, and Goltzius, among others, as part of his larger scholarly study on Roman coins and antiquities.

But the earliest official numismatic bibliography (as a work of its own) can be traced back to Philippe Labbé (1607-1667), a Jesuit priest, who published his Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum in 1664 in Paris. Labbé’s bibliography adopted an alphabetical arrangement by first name of the author and appeared in several editions between 1672 and 1695. This was notably followed by Burckard Gotthelf Struve’s Bibliotheca numismatum antiquiorum (1693), Anselmo Banduri’s Bibliotheca nummaria (1718), Franz Ernest Brückmann’s Bibliotheca numismatica (1729), and Johann Christoph Hirsch Bibliotheca numismatica (1760), which lists more than 1500 works arranged alphabetically by author or title and includes a beautiful frontispiece depicting a numismatic library

Wayne Homren, Editor

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web