ABC’s of Book Collecting : Adams

ADAMS

H.M. Adams’s Catalogue of Books printed in the Continent of Europe, 1501‒1600, in Cambridge Libraries 1967, despite its apparently restrictive title, is the most extensive complete available list of 16th-century European books, a fact frequently acknowledged by booksellers with the formula ‘not in Adams’. All 16th-century books cannot, in the nature of things, be at Cambridge, and other catalogues, off- and online, may supplement the record, but that would spoil the story.