The reason for my dabbling in the craft of the bibliographer was very practical. I wanted to research the history of the sword -- and needed a firm grasp of what litereature was out. I was able to draw on several earlier compilations, including Vigéant's little summary, Castle's fastidious sampling, and, of course, the glorious red cloth-bound of Carl Thimm's work by long-time HF-reader James Cummins in New York.

The problem, however, was that Thimm's work was originally published in 1896. Gelli's later volumes were either unobtainable or unattainable. And Laszlo Nagy's 1985 bibliography was produced in such poor quality that it is like a wet blanket on any serious attempt to consult it.

But just in time for the 100-year-anniversary of Thimm's masterpiece, there's another bibliography that does its darndest to make up for the last century. Henk Pardoel's Complete Bibliography of the Art and Sport of Fencing is one of the most luxurious volumes to hit the market since Paulus Hector Mayr compiled his codices on the fighting arts.

Other than Thimm, whose basic approach was a bibliographic catalog of titles listed alphabetically by author, Pardoel pre-segmented his work into historical periods and subcategories such as Acquiring Skills, Fencing Standards, Oriental Fencing, Fencing and the Movies. He lists close to 4,000 books, articles, journals, microfilms, videos and other sources with near complete bibliographical details.

For his research, Pardoel relied to a large degree on the catalogs of the world's major libraries. This dependence also constitutes the one weakness of his work. By drawing on information provided by librarians, he put himself at the orthographic mercy of library employees entrusted with entering titles into a database. This accounts for misspellings of authors' and book names -- which occasionally crop up as separate works by different authors. And as not all librarians everywhere are masters of every language, non-English language titles catalogued in British or American libraries often are linguistic equivalents of a Raggedy Ann doll chewed up by a pit bull -- not useful at all if you rely on a particular spelling for an electronic keyword search.

This, however, is a minor drawback that no doubt will be fixed and amended along the way. (I know for a fact that some of the greatest private collectors of fencing literature are interested in providing first-hand information!) To me, Pardoel's bibliography remains one of the most useful additions to my library that I've made in recent years -- and a testament to what a single determined and disciplined person can achieve single-handedly!

An expanded edition is scheduled for late 2000 or early 2001. There will be three editions of this work 1) a very limited number of collector quality copies (15-20), 2) a soft cover no frills edition and finally, 3) a CD. Henk also plans to include more bayonet fencing in this edition.