ABSTRACT: (THE HISTORICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GIUSEPPE CERBONI’S WORKS ON BOOK-KEEPING AND ACCOUNTANCY: A TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL ANALYSIS). The bibliography of Giuseppe Cerboni’s works on bookkeeping and accountancy, whose last and most complete edition dates back to 1888, is the first work of its kind, and not only in Italy. Moreover, today it is still the most important bookkeeping bibliography up to that year and an absolutely essential tool for scholars of accounting history. However, this bibliography has never been properly described and, especially, has never been subjected to a reasoned analysis. The present study therefore aims to analyze, using specific interpretative instruments, the contents of this bibliography in order to bring out the data and information that cannot be extrapolated directly from the bibliography itself. The literature in question is in fact presented in order of publication date and does not show aggregations of data, except for a limited attempt provided in the preface of the book. Therefore, after a short introduction of the work and the context in which it is set, the relevant information is “segmented”, reworked and re-aggregated to provide some reflections regarding the writings of accounting distribution over the years and across different geographical areas. This allows us to shed new light on the work and to facilitate access to its contents for scholars of the history of our discipline. In particular, numerical analysis clearly shows that over time, there has been an increase in the geometric progression of writing on accountancy, demonstrating how this discipline has gained importance in the culture of our country, reaching a peak at the close of the nineteenth century. From the geographical analysis, however, it emerges that the vast majority of the works, until the eighteenth century, were published in Venice by Venetians or people in some way connected with the Serenissima Repubblica milieu, very active commercially and where double-entry bookkeeping was commonly used. Subsequently, and in particular in the nineteenth century, however, the greater number of publications were found in Milan, while with the unification of Italy, thanks to the remarkable development of the technical teaching and the accounting profession, the phenomenon extended to the entire country. Possible further developments in this research would consist in similar analyses on foreign bibliographies and related benchmarks.
KEYWORDS: Accounting history, Giuseppe Cerboni, Bibliography
