Bibliography

Bibliography (from Ancient Greek: βιβλίον, romanized: biblion, lit. 'book' and -γραφία, -graphía, 'writing') is a word with two different senses. According to English author and scholar of books John Carter, one sense, probably the more common, is a list of books, texts, or full citations for further study or of works consulted by an author (enumerative bibliography). The other sense is "the study of books as physical objects" and "the systematic description of books as objects" (descriptive bibliography). The second sense as an academic discipline is also known as bibliology to avoid ambiguity (from Ancient Greek: -λογία, romanized: -logía). The first sense is a countable noun, as in "a bibliography", while the second refers to the mass noun "bibliography" as a general concept.

Etymology

The word bibliographia (βιβλιογραφία) was used by Greek writers in the first three centuries CE to mean the copying of books by hand. In the 12th century, the word started being used for "the intellectual activity of composing books." The 17th century then saw the emergence of the modern meaning, that of description of books. Currently, the field of bibliography has expanded to include studies that consider the book as a material object. Bibliography, in its systematic pursuit of understanding the past and the present through written and printed documents, describes a way and means of extracting information from this material. Bibliographers are interested in comparing versions of texts to each other rather than in interpreting their meaning or assessing their significance.