Books › De fidiculis bibliographia: being an attempt towards a bibliography of the violin and all other instruments played with a bow in ancient and modern times, 1890 › scan 29
Scan 29
De fidiculis bibliographia: being an attempt towards a bibliography of the violin and all other instruments played with a bow in ancient and modern times, 1890
4 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1of Violin Collections, my work is, I know, particularly incomplete, but I have not had leisure to attend violin sales, the catalogues of such sales are notoriously ephemeral, and those persons who attend the sales and have the catalogues either destroy them, or for some mysterious reason are loth to let them out of their possession. For the amplification of this part I must depend on my readers and correspondents. I am happy to say that I have been able to collect since 1890 many of the works, whose titles I knew, but of which I had never seen copies, so that the Appendix of uncollated works is by comparison small.
3When I began the task of systematizing and reducing to categories my vast collection of titles, both of books and pamphlets, and of extracts and articles, I failed to realize that such a system was impossible in practice, however desirable it might have appeared in principle. It was not until I had reached the end of Part I. that I fully realized the futility of attempting to class books or extracts relating to the violin, save on the broadest principles. The difficulty that I experienced in separating the practical and theoretical works from Méthodes and instruction books, and, in turn, instruction books from mere books of exercises, was one that in the light of my present experience I should never have attempted to solve. The progression of this class is as follows: (i.) Pure theory including acoustics; (ii.) Works on technique; (iii.) Individual technique and schools of violin-playing; (iv.) Works on Violin music; (v.) Methodes and Instruction books; and excluding the last class, I should have included all the other four in one
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