Bibliography of Canadian Bibliographies. 3rd ed.

Boyd Holmes is a librarian in Toronto.

This dauntingly huge book provides references to 7212 Canadian
bibliographies, published between 1789 and 1993, and 163 ongoing
Canadian bibliographies. The references are arranged chronologically,
within 48 sections, under such subject headings as Architecture,
Audio-visual Materials, Fisheries, Forestry, Maps, and Theses. (Under
Individuals, however, the entries are listed alphabetically by subject.)
Each reference is thorough yet concise, and gives at least one location
for the item in question. The book concludes with indexes for authors,
titles, and subjects, plus lists of short entries and serial titles
searched.

In this masterwork of scholarship, however, several bibliographies have
been missed, including W.A.C.H. Dobson’s The Contributions of Canadian
Universities to an Understanding of Asia and Africa (second edition,
1967); the National Gallery Association’s Artists in Canada: A Union
List of Files (1982); the Public Archives of Canada’s Checklist of
Parish Registers (1981); Statistics Canada’s Statistical Information
on Transportation Available from Federal and Provincial Governments
(revised edition, 1984); Carl Vincent’s Records of the Canadian
Transport Commission (1984); and Jane R. Williamson’s New Feminist
Scholarship: A Guide to Bibliographies (1979). Also, the book’s format
makes it hard to scan the Individuals section when searching for the
subjects of the bibliographies. Still, this book is an immense
achievement and Ingles’s bibliographical skills clearly rival those of
Theodore Besterman and Marie Tremaine.