Early Modern Western Printing:Modern Classification System
• Information, including works on language, business training and skills, education, husbandry, popular science and medicine.
• Ephemera, including ballads, almanacs, catalogues and news pamphlets.
• History, both popular and scholarly.• Law & Politics, including law books and non-religious
polemics.• Literature, including belles lettres and popular,
classical and travel works.• Official Documents, including forms, and
proclamations.• Religion, including sermons, bibles, prayer books,
instruction and commentary along with controversial and devotional works.
Early Modern Western Printing:Bookseller Classification System
• Divinity, including sermons, commentary, ecclesiastical controversies, instruction, psalm paraphrases, and devotionals.
• Bibles, including Psalm collections and the Book of Common Prayer.
• Physick, including medicine, chemistry, and anatomy.• Histories, including current and ancient subjects,
romances, travel literature, and lives.• Humanities, including husbandry, philosophy, statecraft,
language, education, shorthand, jests, music, and epigrams.
• Poetry and Plays, classical and modern.• Mathematics, including astrology, architecture,
navigation, physics, surveying, arithmetic, carpentry, and optics.
• Foreign Languages, including non-law Latin and French.• Law.• Miscellaneous, including state documents, political tracts,
Catholic and Quaker literature, newspapers, pageants, ballads, almanacs, and “Wonderment Tracts,” all items that Arber mentions as rarely occurring in the Term Catalogues.
Early Modern Western Printing:Public-Private Classification System
• Grammar.• Rhetoric.• Logic.• Arithmetic.• Geometry.• Music.• Astronomy.• Philosophy.• Theology.
• Law.• Natural Science, including
medicine, chemistry, husbandry, etc.
• Belle Lettres, including poetry and drama.
• Commerce.• Histories, including current and
ancient subjects, romances, travel literature, and lives.
• Popular Theology, including inspirational and devotional texts as well as sermons.
• Bibles.• Miscellaneous, including
ephemera, popular entertainments, and informational works.
Scholastic Secular