Kallimachos (Callimachus), a renowned poet and head of the Alexandrian Library, compiles a catalogue of its holdings which he calls Pinakes (Tables or Lists).
Supposedly extending to 120 papyrus scrolls, this catalogue amounted to a systematic survey of Greek literature up to its time. It also represented the origins of bibliography. Only a few fragments survived the eventual destruction of the library, together with a scattering of references to it in other ancient works.
Callimachus’s bibliographical methods would not be out of place in a modern library; an analysis of the eight remaining fragments of the Pinakes shows that Callimachus
"1. divided the authors into classes and within these classes if necessary into subdivisions;
"2. arranged the authors in the classes or subdivisions alphabetically;
"3. added to the name of each author (if possible) biographical data;
"4. listed under an author’s name the titles of his works, combining works of the same kind to groups (no more than that can be deduced from the eight citations); and
"5. cited the opening words of each work as well as
"6. its extent, i.e., the number of lines" (Blum, p. 152).
The surviving fragments of Kallimachos's Pinakes were first published in print in Hymni, epigrammata et fragmenta, edited by Theodor J. G. F. Graevius et al. (Utrecht, 1697). That edition included the first edition of the commentary by Ezechiel Spanheim, and also incorporated the 420 fragments collected and elucidated by the English theologian, classical scholar and critic Richard Bentley, whose reading of these fragments represents “the earliest example of a really critical method applied to such a work" (Dictionary of National Biography).
Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography. Its History and Development (1984) no. 1. Blum, Kallimachos. The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography. Translated by Hans H. Wellisch (1991).
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