William Thomas Lowndes stands as one of the great luminaries of British bibliography and was perhaps the first truly systematic and critical bibliographer of printing in the English language. His great achievement was The Bibliographer's Manual, which attempted to provide for English literature an equivalent of Jacques-Charles Brunet's Manuel du Libraire et de l'Amateur de Livres, first published in Paris in 1810. Lowndes was thereby bringing to fruition a scheme for a British national bibliography envisaged and attempted first by Bishop John Bale in the sixteenth century and continued on a more limited compass by scholars such as Anthony Wood, or Joseph Ames in the eighteenth century. Lowndes's other great inspiration was Robert Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica (1819-1824), a work that began to be published the year before Lowndes embarked upon his own scheme, and of which he was to claim in the preface of The Bibliographer's Manual that "no...