Joseph-Marie Quérard (1797–1865), a self-taught bibliographer of legendary tenacity, published with Firmin Didot, from 1827 to 1839, La France littéraire, ou Dictionnaire bibliographique des savants, historiens et gens de lettres de la France, ainsi que des littérateurs étrangers qui ont écrit en français, plus particulièrement pendant les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, in ten volumes, which he himself completed with two volumes of corrections and additions (1854–1864). He followed this with La Littérature française contemporaine, 1827-1849 (1842–1857, completed by Louandre, Bourquelot and Maury) and with Les Supercheries littéraires dévoilées (1847–1853), the repertory of pseudonyms and literary forgeries.
Quérard is cited by volume and page: "Quérard, II, 345". The entry for an author gives a few lines of biography followed by a list of his works, with place, date, format and number of volumes, together with reprints and translations, and often a note on the history of the text or the controversy it provoked. The reference guarantees that a work is recorded and attributed, and allows an edition to be dated or an author writing under a pen name to be identified; it does not distinguish the first edition and describes no particular copy.
Its limitations stem from its method: Quérard compiled his listings from the announcements in the Bibliographie de la France and from catalogues as much as from the books themselves, hence the occasional phantom editions and deposit dates mistaken for publication dates; the volumes of corrections are indispensable; the nineteenth-century section stops in the 1830s. Quérard is consulted for attribution and publishing history, and then Brunet, Cohen, Vicaire or Clouzot for bibliophilic description. Twentieth-century reprints (Maisonneuve et Larose, 1964) and digitisation on Gallica make it readily accessible.
