ABSTRACT
Professionally trained bibliographers routinely explain, to those of us who are not, that any ordering of information for scholarly use can be arranged along several, mutually exclusive lines, none of them entirely satisfactory nor perfectly suited for the various, unanticipated audiences who might wish to use a given compilation. Each type of bibliography is by its nature a compromise, suffering from peculiar limitations of intellectual organization, source material, time, available pages, or other typical constraints. In addition to such intrinsic liabilities associated with presenting material in one format versus another, all printed bibliographies are now challenged by the torrential outpouring of information unevenly available in electronic form. The very concept of an “exhaustive bibliography,” particularly concerning Weber, has over the last decade become permanently antique, since worthwhile items are added daily to standard computerized databases. Whereas in times past a “standard bibliography” on a given author or topic might hold its own for decades, that characteristic permanence is now gone.
