What sunny ambition, what cheerful optimism it must take to be a bibliographer: To sit down in the resolve to tally and analyze everything ever written about any subject, even the most carefully circumscribed, seems laudable folly. And yet it has been done.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Reuben Myron Strong, anatomist, birder, and bookman. His Bibliography of Birds — a modestly straightforward title — was completed in 1939, with two index volumes to follow in 1946 and 1959. Praised at the time as “the most valuable tool ever forged for students of Ornithology,” the Bibliography doesn’t get much of a workout nowadays, I think, but it’s a grand thing to browse when you have a curious moment or two.
What I most admire in such undertakings is the range of sources a good bibliographer can assemble. Strong’s bookish net catches papers published in the German Dentistry Monthly and the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, and he dutifully registers both such earnest page-turners as James H. Stewart’s “Value of Skim Milk for Egg Production” and such quaint curiosities as Frederick Stubbs’s “Magpie Marriages.”
You could read for years — just as did R.M. Strong.
Also of interest: Strong’s brief experimentation with a new military technology on the Great Lakes.
