Geleitwort Wer sich mit der Ermittlung, der Katalogisierung oder dem bibliographischen Nachweis Alter Drucke befasst, benötigt eine breite Palette der unterschiedlichsten Hilfsmittel. Da, wo noch keine modernen Standardreferenzwerke vorliegen, ist der Rückgriff auf ältere, zeitnahe oder zeitgenössische Werke oft unverzichtbar. Im Rahmen seiner langjährigen Tätigkeit an der National Library of Scotland hat sich Dr. William A. Kelly intensiv mit der retrospektiven Bibliographie der deutschen und der niederländischen Druckschriften beschäftigt und über viele Jahre hinweg auf diesem Gebiet ein beinahe konkurrenzloses Expertenwissen erworben. Es ehrt ihn, dass er diese Kenntnisse von Anfang an mit anderen, bibliothekarischen Kollegen zumal, teilen wollte. Ursprünglich war „nur“ an eine Ergänzung eines bereits 1982 eingeführten Hilfsmittels gedacht – der Standard Citation Forms of published bibliographies and catalogues used in rare book cataloging nämlich. Angesichts der umfassenden Kenntnisse und der Gründlichkeit des Bearbeiters zeigte sich jedoch rasch, dass das Supplement für den deutschen und niederländischen Bereich den Umfang des gesamten Hauptwerks um ein vielfaches übertreffen würde: In seinem verdienstvollen Verzeichnis weist Dr. Kelly fast 2.150 einschlägige (bio-)bibliographische Nachschlagewerke nach. Da ein derart hoch-spezialisiertes Werk jedoch naturgemäß nur einen sehr eingeschränkten Käuferkreis findet, mochte – trotz großer inhaltlicher Wertschätzung - kein Verleger das unternehmerische Risiko einer kommerziellen Publikation eingehen. Als Dr. Kelly auf der Suche nach alternativen Publikationsmöglichkeiten bei der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz anfragte, waren wir gerne bereit, sein Werk in angepasster Form in das elektronische Informationsangebot der Abteilung Historische Drucke zu integrieren. Der Charakter des Buchmanuskripts wurde auch für die elektronische Präsentationsform im Wesentlichen beibehalten. Für Aufbau und Inhalt zeichnet Dr. Kelly verantwortlich; Beschlagwortung und Transliteration folgen anglo- amerikanischen Konventionen. Auch wenn es nicht möglich war, das Werk als Datenbank zu restrukturieren, hoffen wir – zusammen mit dem Kollegen Kelly – dass Bibliographen, (Buch-)Historiker, Katalogisierer, Antiquare und viele andere Interessierte es in der vorgelegten Form mit Gewinn benutzen werden. Für sein großzügiges Angebot, sein Werk kostenfrei zur Verfügung zu stellen, sei Herrn Dr. Kelly nachdrücklich gedankt. Gerd-J. Bötte Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz Stellvertretender Leiter der Abteilung Historische Drucke Berlin, 2004/2016 W.A. Kelly Hon. Research Fellow Scottish Centre for the Book Edinburgh Napier University Reference resources for cataloguing German and Low Countries imprints to ca. 1800. Seventh edition. Galashiels Cat’s Whiskers Press 2016 ©The author Foreword The genesis of the present work goes back to the late months of 1970 after I had taken up a post of Assistant Keeper in the Department of Printed Books at the National Library of Scotland with part- icular responsibility for the German collections, when I began to record in a notebook, which over the years grew into a series, the bibliographical details of reference works on all aspects of early German printing which I came across in antiquarian and second-hand booksellers’ catalogues and other sources. However it was not until a number of years later, when I was looking through the first edition of Stand- ard citation forms for published bibliographies and catalogs used in rare book cataloging (SCF) , which had been published in 1982 by the Library of Congress on the recommendation of the Ad Hoc Committee on Standards for Rare Book Cataloging in Machine-Readable Form of the Independent Research Libraries Association, that I was struck not only by its preoccupation with the narrowly based North American-British cultural axis but also by its traditional, almost reverential, regard for incun- ables. In a more immediate attempt to correct the paucity of its coverage of both German and Low Countries bibliography, the latter having been added to my responsibilities by that time, I contacted Peter VanWingen and Belinda Urquiza of the Library of Congress, who had been charged by the Bib- liographic Standards Committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries of the American Library Association with the preparation of a second edition of that work, with a suggestion that an attempt should be made to increase the coverage of German and Low Countries bibliography. As a result I submitted what I felt, given the short time at my disposal, were the most obvious titles. Knowing, however, that reference works in these two geographical areas are far richer and deserving to be made known to those rare book cataloguers and antiquarian and second-hand booksellers with little or no acquaintance of them, I reduced my notes to a more usable format before issuing a series of three increasingly fuller lists under my own imprint, The Cat’s Whiskers Press. I also had the hope at that time of helping to lay the foundations of a third edition of Standard citation forms of even greater international coverage, should one be called for. This hope was kept alive in a slightly altered form by a brief correspondence by e-mail with a rare book cataloguer in the United States, who expressed some personal interest in a companion volume to the second edition of Standard citation forms . However as my continuing investigations revealed ever more titles of monographs and important periodical articles and as the likelihood of a third edition of SCF grew more unlikely, the thought, bolstered by the re- alisation that SCF has little currency in British and European libraries, began to impress itself on me that there is something intrinsically absurd in the idea of a companion volume, running by that time to more than one thousand, seven hundred entries, which dwarfed so considerably the original work. This thought grew more pronounced as several publishers rejected the sales potential of such a companion volume. In this connection I have to thank Dr. David Shaw, at that time the secretary of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), and Prof. Alistair McCleery of the Scottish Centre for the Book at Edinburgh Napier University for impressing on me the advisability of making a work of this nature available online. However particular thanks must go to three individuals for agreeing to make this monograph available on the website of the State Library in Berlin, Gerd-Joseph Bötte, Annette Wehmeyer and Maria Federbusch. When I approached the first-named of these three with the offer of my text, I was very pleasantly surprised by the speed and warmth of his response. That edition, the fourth, was available only on its website. This, the seventh, is the fruit of my more recent researches. The focus of this work is the printing output and intellectual history of the Dutch- and German- language areas of Europe. This focus on Europe must be emphasised, as no attempt has been made to include works dealing with the long-term Dutch or German settlements in South or North America, whose printing output has always lain outside my professional remit. In the first instance the term, Europe, presents no great difficulty, comprehending as it does the present-day Netherlands and Fland- ers, the northern part of the present-day Belgium, but in that of the second would require a considerable degree of instruction in German history, were it not obviated by reference to Josef Benzing’s Die Buch- drucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet . 2., verb. u. erg. Aufl. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1982), now enlarged and updated by Christoph Reske, Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet. Auf der Grundlage des gleichnamigen Werkes von Josef Benzing . 2., überarb. und erw. Aufl. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015. xxxiv,1181 S. (Beiträge zum Buch- und Bibliothekswesen; 51), and David L. Paisey’s Deutsche Buchdrucker, Buchhändler und Verleger 1701-1750 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988), where the uninitiated can see that many towns such as Breslau, Danzig, Königsberg and Strassburg, whose commercial and intellectual history were controlled for many centuries by a dominant German population, are correctly included, even although they do not lie within the present boundaries of Germany. The focus mentioned above means that I have regarded as legitimate for inclusion here both reference works devoted entirely to these areas or ones with a significant amount of Low Countries or German content, even if they have been published in other parts of the world. My aim in the present work is a practical one, to provide rare book cataloguers, antiquarian book- sellers and book historians, who have little or no knowledge of German and Low Countries imprints, with an up to date, as nearly comprehensive as possible, list of reference resources on the printed re- cord of these two intellectually important areas of Europe. The justification of this practical approach was unwittingly given by the anonymous individual who, in reading this work on behalf of a print pub- lisher, defended his/her doubts on the unlikely commercial viability of such a specialised work by com- menting that (s)he was already able to catalogue early German imprints adequately without resorting to such a work as this. For adequacy is akin to complacency in being the enemy of intellectual and