Simon, Konstantin

Born Aug. 16, 1887; died June 30, 1966, in Moscow. Soviet historian, specialist in bibliology, and bibliographer. Doctor of historical sciences (1964).

Simon graduated from Moscow University in 1911. From 1939 until the end of his life he worked in the Main Library in the Social Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He also taught bibliography at the Moscow State Library Institute. Simon studied the history of encyclopedias, historical bibliography, the problems of abstract periodicals, statistics of the world print media, and other topics. Beginning in the 1930’s, he conducted research on the theory and terminology of bibliography, which he summed up in the dictionary Bibliography: Basic Concepts and Terms (published posthumously in 1968). His primary works were on foreign bibliography. They include the tables Foreign Universal Bibliography (1940), the textbook Foreign General Bibliography (1941), and the monograph The History of Foreign Bibliography (1963).