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A: Bezirk Eimsbüttel, Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Johan Christoph Wolf Issues the First Bibliography of the History of Printing

1740

Monumenta typographica, quae artis hujus praestantissimae originem, Laudem et abusum posteris produnt by the German Christian Hebraist, polyhistor, and book collector, Johan Christoph Wolf, was posthumously published in Hamburg by Christian Herold in 2 thick volumes in 1740. In this work Wolf reprinted roughly 50 texts of varying lengths and significance to do with the history of printing and typography, some of which are very obscure and difficult to find elsewhere. He prefaced the set with a 96-page bibliography of the history of printing— the first bibliography on this subject. That such a specialized bibliography could extend to 96 pages by 1740 is a reflection of the amount of scholarly interest in the history of printing that had developed in the 200 years since Gutenberg's invention. A special feature of Wolf's bibliography was his thematic index indicating, among other things, which authors believed that Laurenz Janszoon Coster was the inventor of printing, and those who credited Gutenberg, indicating that this was still a major topic of historical pre-occupation at the time.

Bigmore & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing III, 91-92 list all the separate works published in the set, but appear to confuse the author with the German mathematician philosopher Christian Wolff

According to the Wikipedia, the author of Monumenta typographia, Johan Christoph Wolf, collected a library of 25,000 volumes.

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