Anonymity, in Bulk
With some modern exceptions (see ?How to Write 85,000 Books,? elsewhere in this issue of the Annals of Improbable Research) every book has a human author.1 For whatever reasons, some of those books are published anonymously. The late nineteenth century saw a massive effort to identify and list all the anonymous books and other literature published in at least one language.
The result:
A Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain, Including the Work of Foreigners Written in, or Translated into the English Language, Samuel Halkett and John Laing, 1888, W. Paterson publishers, Edinburgh.
(That’s an excerpt from the article “Anonymity, in Bulk,” by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, published in AIR 14:2)