A still more important question was whether the Catalogue ought to be printed at all. The opinion of the literary witnesses unconnected with the Museum was naturally strongly in favour of a printed Catalogue. The opinion of Panizzi may be gathered from the verbal replies he had already given to questions put to him by the Library Committee of the Trustees on March 6th, 1847.
“The Catalogue might be completed by the end of 1854 of all the books which the Museum will contain up to that period. It would take to 1860 to prepare such Catalogue in such a state of revision as might be fit for the press. It would occupy seventy volumes. It would require one year to correct the press of two volumes. It would, therefore, require thirty-five years to pass the catalogue through the press, and, when completed in 1895, it would represent the state of the Library in 1854.”
This estimate could not be impeached if its basis were admitted—namely, that the system already adopted in framing the Catalogue was to be adhered to. Many men of letters, however, thought that the plan of the Catalogue might be contracted with advantage, but found it difficult to answer the argument that the work already done must, in that case, be thrown away. Mr. J. Payne Collier, the Secretary to the Commission, apparently thought this sacrifice immaterial. He had convinced himself that by short entries, and a disregard of minor niceties, the rate of cataloguing could be accelerated fourfold, and was, perhaps, justified in considering that if so, the abandonment of all that had been effected would be a measure of economy. Unluckily for Mr. Collier, he did not, like Panizzi’s other antagonists, confine himself to abstract propositions, but rashly exhibited himself in the light of an amateur cataloguer. He catalogued twenty-five books in his own library, and placed the titles in the hands of Panizzi, who transferred them for examination to his principal Assistant, Mr. Winter Jones. “They contain,” said Mr. Jones, “almost every possible error which can be committed in cataloguing books, and are open to almost every possible objection which can be brought against concise titles.”
As Mr. Collier had entered a play of Aristophanes under Mitchell, and the works of Shakespeare under Schlegel, as he had put an anonymous English book under a writer to whom it was only attributed conjecturally, and had catalogued a collection of plays in such a manner as to suggest that it was a history of the drama, the justice of Mr. Jones’ characterization could not be disputed. The Commissioners were, doubtless, justified in the unexpressed conclusion at which they evidently arrived, that such blunders, committed by a man of Mr. Collier’s attainments, must be attributable to the fundamental errors of his system. Mr. J. Bruce, Mr. G. L. Craik, and other advocates of hasty work and concise catalogues, would have fared no better at the hands of Mr. Winter Jones. One of them, indeed, Mr. J. G. Cochrane, of the London Library, had actually produced a Catalogue, the unscientific character of which was pungently exposed by Professor De Morgan, by far the most bibliographically competent of all the witnesses, and whose profound acquaintance with early mathematical literature enabled him to demonstrate what research, accuracy, and scholarship, the correct description of such literature demands. Another valuable witness was Mr. John Wilson Croker, whose evidence was in general full of good sense, and who brought forward the scheme (already independently suggested by Mr. E. Roy of the Library) for keeping up the Catalogue on movable slips pasted on the leaf, and thus admitting of displacement when it became necessary to insert new matter. This plan was subsequently adopted, and proved adequate for all practical purposes until recently, when, from the enormous bulk of the Manuscript Catalogue, printing has been adopted.