ing 714 pages
octavo. It gives under each topic, an alphabet of authors, followed by
titles of the works, given with approximate fullness, followed by place
and year of publication, but without publishers' names. The number of
pages is also given where ascertained, and the price of the work quoted
in sterling English money. This work, by a competent German-English
book-publisher of London, is preceded by a brief history of American
literature, and closes with a full index of authors whose works are
catalogued in it.

We come now to by far the most comprehensive and ambitious attempt to
cover not only the wide field of American publications, but the still
more extensive field of books relating to America, which has ever yet
been made. I refer to the "Bibliotheca Americana; a dictionary of books
relating to America," by Joseph Sabin, begun more than thirty years ago,
in 1868, and still unfinished, its indefatigable compiler having died in
1881, at the age of sixty. This vast bibliographical undertaking was
originated by a variously-gifted and most energetic man, not a scholar,
but a bookseller and auctioneer, born in England. Mr. Sabin is said to
have compiled more catalogues of private libraries that have been
brought to the auctioneer's hammer, than any man who ever lived in
America. He bought and sold, during nearly twenty years, old and rare
books, in a shop in Nassau street, New York, which was the resort of book
collectors and bibliophiles without number. He made a specialty of
Americana, and of early printed books in English literature, crossing the
Atlantic twenty-five times to gather fresh stores with which to feed his
hungry American customers. During all these years, he worked steadily at
his _magnum opus_, the bibliography of America, carrying with him in his
many journeys and voyages, in cars or on ocean steamships, copy and
proofs of some part of the work. There have been completed about ninety
parts, or eighteen thick volumes of nearly 600 pages each; and since his
death the catalogue has been brought down to the letter S, mainly by Mr.
Wilberforce Eames, librarian of the Lenox Library, New York. Though its
ultimate completion must be regarded as uncertain, the great value to all
librarians, and students of American bibliography or history, of the work
so far as issued, can hardly be over-estimated. Mr. Sabin had the benefit
in revising the proofs of most of the work, of the critical knowledge and
large exp