William Thomas Lowndes

William Thomas Lowndes (c. 1798 – 31 July 1843), English bibliographer, was born about 1798, the son of a London bookseller.

His principal work, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature—the first systematic work of the kind—was published in four volumes in 1834. It took Lowndes fourteen years to compile, but, despite its merits, brought him neither fame nor money. "For years Lowndes was the national British bibliography." It is regarded as a "bibliographical classic" although "pleasurably more scattershot than systematic."

Lowndes, reduced to poverty, subsequently became cataloguer to Henry George Bohn, the bookseller and publisher. In 1839 he published the first parts of The British Librarian, designed to supplement his early manual, but owing to failing health did not complete the work.

References

Further reading

• The Bibliographer's Manual of English Literature, Volume 6: Appendix, Bell & Daldy, 1865.
• George Watson Cole, "Do You Know Your Lowndes? A Bibliographic Essay on William Thomas Lowndes and Incidentally on Thomas Watt and Henry G. Bohn (1939)", in: Donald C. Dickinson, George Watson Cole, 1850-1939, Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1967, series: The Great Bibliographers, 8)
• Francesco Cordasco, "William Lowndes and The Bibliographer's Manual: A Retrospective Essay," in: Lowndes, The Bibliographer's Manual (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1967, revised edition), 1:v-xii.
• David A. Stoker, "William Thomas Lowndes", in: Nineteenth-Century British Book-Collectors and Bibliographers, ed. William Baker and Kenneth Womack (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1997, series: Dictionary of Literary Biography, 184), pp. 265–70.

External links

• The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature, Vol. 1, William Pickering, 1834