Gessner, however, examines every single book meticulously to gather complete specifi cations of format, title, authors (provided they are named or discoverable), place of publica-tion, and year of publication. 7 Then he appends a content description. Hence, Konrad Gessner can rightly count as the father of the modern bibliography.

by the eighteenth century, suchchapters were being expanded into sizeable books that functioned primarily as natural historybibliographies in their own right. An early example of this practice was Johann JakobScheuchzer’s Bibliotheca scriptorium(1716).