Editing Cotton library (section)

==Classification==
Sir Robert Cotton had organised his library according to the case, shelf and position of a book within a room twenty-six feet long and six feet wide. Each bookcase in his library was surmounted by a bust of a historical personage, including [[Augustus Caesar]], [[Cleopatra]], [[Julius Caesar]], [[Nero]], [[Otho]], and [[Vespasian]]. In total, he had fourteen busts, and his scheme involved a designation of bust name/shelf letter/volume number from left end.<ref name=":0" /> Thus, the two most famous of the manuscripts from the Cotton library are "Cotton Vitellius A.xv" and "[[Pearl Manuscript|Cotton Nero A.x]]". In Cotton's own day, that meant "Under the bust of [[Vitellius]], top shelf (A), and count fifteen over" for the volume containing the [[Nowell Codex]] (including ''[[Beowulf]]'') and "Go to the bust of Nero, top shelf, tenth book" for the manuscript containing all the works of the [[Pearl Poet]]. The manuscripts are still catalogued by these call numbers in the British Library.

According to scholar, Colin Tite, the system according to the busts was probably not in full effect until 1638; however there are notes that suggest that Sir Robert planned to arrange the library in this system before his death in 1631, but was probably, as Tite hypothesises, interrupted during the implementation by the closure of the library in 1629.<ref name="tite80">{{Cite journal|last=Tite|first=Colin G. C.|title=The Early Catalogues of the Cottonian Library|journal=The British Library Journal|volume=6|issue=2 |year=1980 |pages=144–157 |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211004094526/https://www.bl.uk/eblj/1980articles/article12.html }}</ref>

In 1696, the first printed catalogue of the Cotton library's holdings was published by [[Thomas Smith (scholar)|Thomas Smith]], the librarian of Sir John Cotton, Sir Robert Cotton's grandson. The library's official catalogue was published in 1802 by [[Joseph Planta (librarian)|Joseph Planta]], which remained the standard guide to the library's contents until modern times.<ref name="tite80"/>