The old and rare book market is still completely old fashioned. Most of the best books on the field are out of print and themselves hard to find (we collectors

The old and rare book market is still completely old fashioned. Most of the best books on the field are out of print and themselves hard to find (we collectors horde them). See my other reply to you about bibliographies. There isn’t a central repository because we’re talking about millennia worth of very messy data [1]. Instead we have to first find a bibliography (usually itself an old or rare book from the same decade or century), make sure its not full of shit, then use that to identify the books we’re actually interested in. Edit: should have added a disclaimer that I collect books that were published before the ISBN was a thing. There’s definitely an ISBN database [1] collecting pre-Gutenberg manuscripts is insanely fun, hard, and eye wateringly expensive