What future for carto‐bibliography? Available to Purchase

‘CARTO‐BIBLIOGRAPHY’ must surely be just about the ugliest term in a cartographer's vocabulary, but to its inventor, Sir Henry George Fordham, it represented something of the very greatest significance, and it is as well for us that it did. It was in 1896 that Sir George made his decision to compile a catalogue of Hertfordshire maps, ‘little conscious’, he was later to confide, ‘of the amplitude such a work could assume’. Can there be anyone who has undertaken a carto‐bibliography since who has not echoed at some point Fordham's confession? Working alone, and without guidance from any similar previous compilations, he had no choice but to devise his own forms, methods, and arrangements, ‘digesting my materials’, as he put it, ‘according to the lights they seemed to throw upon the subject’. The resulting compilation, the first real British carto‐bibliography to see the light of day, began to appear in the Transactions of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society in October 1901. Six years later, in September 1907, it was completed and published in volume form as Hertfordshire maps: a descriptive catalogue of the maps of the county, 1579–1900. A supplement followed in 1914.