PagesOfPages.com. Bibliographies and checklists of books

Bibliographies, Checklists & Notes
The Peninsular War 1808-1814	Dover Publications	Publisher Series	Authors	Lecture Series
Introduction	Introduction	Bohn's Antiquarian Library	Augustus De Morgan	Sather Lectures
Memoirs	Mystery & Detective Stories	Bohn's Classical Library		Gifford Lectures
General Histories	Science Fiction & Fantasy	The Cresset Library
Fiction	Travel & Exploration	Dent Classic Thrillers
Studies, Battles, etc.		Loeb Classical Library

PagesOfPages.com represents a series of experiments with the creations of lists of books, of varying degree of complexity and in different types of groupings, for the purpose of seeing just how useful - or not - it may be to take advantage of the of capabilities of the internet to enrich a listing of books with aids for the reader, collector or researcher. When a bibliography is presented in traditional printed form it will be expected to be either comprehensive of its subject, or to be intelligently curated, and/or to be enriched with annotation¹ and/or to have detailed descriptive information to aid in identification of, say, first printings. The bar to producing a printed bibliography is high due to both the knowledge and the time required to accumulate any of these types of bibliographies, and the difficulties and expense of printing and publication.

An online list of books, whether formal or informal, has no particular bar at all to publication. The good and the bad of that are now well known; the proliferation of so much digital wastepaper makes finding genuinely useful sources difficult. Never the less I believe real value can be provided by the capabilities of a web page. These include the following.

Links to reference materials, such as Wikipedia. In many of the PagesOfPages listings the author names are theselves link to an article in the wiki or to some other site, providing background information.
Links to more authoritative book citations, such as to WorldCat, or the British Library. These are particularly useful for rare or obscure books; The Peninsular War bibliography makes extensive use of WorldCat links in particular.
Links to bookselling sites that provide searches for the individual books in a listing. Standard targets include AbeBooks, Alibris, Amazon, and Biblio.com. Searches may be by isbn, author/title, and perhaps with key word and date limitations, depending on circumstance. These are most useful for rare or unusual books; everyone should always check with their local bookshops.
Links to the full text of the book. For titles that are out of copyright there are often digitized copies of the books available online and without charge. Project Gutenberg² is the original of the full text sources, but offerings have been greatly expanded by the Hathi Trust, the British Library and by Google Books. Some of the listings on PagesOfPages - such as the Bohn Antiquarian Library listing - have links to full text of every title in the listing.
Links to reviews of the works. This is a recent enhancement I have just started to make to the Peninsular War listing; it seems valuable to me if there is an interesting review, contemporaneous with the book's original publication, and where there can be a link to a copy of the original review. Adding a snippet or two from a review can provide a interesting perspective on the place of an older book.

^{1. For example, World War One Memories An Annotated Bibliography of Personal Accounts Published in English Since 1919
by Edward Lengel is an example of a bibliography that is both comprehensive and well-annotated, providing real
value to anyone interested in finding "what to read next" in its subject area.}
^{2. Project Gutenberg is the only source used here where the original text of each book is actually
present - as letters, words, paragraphs and so on - rather than as photographic reproductions of each page. This makes for a superior reading experience,
but none of the online presentations match the experience of reading a physical book.}

Pages Of Pages

Experiments in Online Bibliography