[2] The Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner started to compile his extensive work on Bibliotheca universalis[3] at the age of 25.
[4] He described the project in its title, as involving works "extant and not, ancient and more recent down to the present day, learned and not, published and hiding in libraries".
Gessner listed the writers together with the titles of their works, short biographies, and publication details including place of printing, printers and editors.
[6] In 1548, Gessner followed this with a companion thematic index to Bibliotheca universalis, a large folio, Pandectarum sive Partitionum universalium Conradi Gesneri Tigurini, medici & philosophiae professoris, libri xxi (Pandectae).
The Counter Reformation's response took another generation of Catholic scholarship to produce and appeared on the Vatican press in Rome in 1593 under the programmatic title, Bibliotheca selecta.
This updated "Anti-Gessner" was assembled in 18 books covering the bibliography of the traditional scientific disciplines (Theology, 1-11, Law, 12, Philosophy, 13, Medicine, 14) and the liberal arts, 15–18, by the Mantuan Jesuit humanist and bibliographer Antonio Possevino.