British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books

Another tremendous weight of words!

What we have is the Readex compact edition (extremely small print). "Compact" is not exactly the word which immediately springs to mind at the sight as this is 32 large and very heavy volumes. 

This is the catalogue to 1979, which was the second-to-last printed version before the British Museum put its catalogue online.

I would imagine this is something that might be of interest to scholars compiling bibliographies of particular authors (because the BM would be comprehensive and accurate).

It's not entirely true that online catalogues have made printed ones redundant; one of my work colleagues was startled to find his notes were the only record of some valuable books belonging to a library in France. This library had thrown away its card index but made errors in transcribing it to produce its online catalogue so that the books were there sitting on the shelves but impossible to locate.

For sale at 188 Mill Road for £100 for the set or £3.50 for a single volume.

Update: 30/10/2012
Now sold