The book's peculiar form is explained by comparison with the Bibliothèque Orientale's most important source, the bibliography of the seventeenth-century Ottoman scholar Kātib Çelebi: his work not only provided much of the Bibliothèque Orientale's content but inspired its organisation as well. This article examines the Bibliothèque Orientale's idiosyncratic organisation, which has elicited comment over the centuries, and investigates whether it restricted the book's reception, as has sometimes been claimed.
Writing in French, d'Herbelot drew on an impressive variety of Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts that he had read in Florence and in Paris. When it appeared in Paris in 1697, the Bibliothèque Orientale of Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville (1625–95) became the most complete reference work about Islamic history and letters in the West.
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