Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Adventures in pedantry ...

... this is hilarious: false game.

i found that while the bibliographic art was presented as a complex but coherent and comprehensible structure, it was in fact a pile of shit. There was one rule for how to set out, say, Volume 3 in a 7-volume work; but this contradicted the rule for how to set out a work in a series, and some books were both. The supposed master textbook gave no hint of how to resolve these contradictions. And so on, with every possible permutation: the rules in fact only held good at the simplest possible level; beyond that, they collapsed completely. As with many man-made systems, it was impossible to play by the rules.

2 comments:

  1. Should a universal Bibliography of Bibliographies incude itself?

    ReplyDelete
  2. include, that is

    ReplyDelete