Cataloging 19th-Century Children’s Books

Abstract

Many librarians, catalogers among them, assume that cataloging children’s books must be very easy work, and any discussion thereof necessarily brief. One librarian summed it up by saying, “All you have to do is title plus … ‘Bunnies’.” When I hear this I feel a certain amount of righteous indignation; cataloging 19th-century children’s books involves more than title-page transcription and an obvious subject heading. I also feel that it puts the whole matter into perspective. Ultimately, we who are working with historical children’s books are looking at relatively minor publications—but we are looking at them very intensely.

The patrons . . .