Until recently, anyone with a scholarly interest in Eric Hobsbawm would sooner or later be told to contact Keith McClelland. The reason was simple: He held the (virtual) keys to an extraordinary document — a PDF file that contained details of almost everything Hobsbawm ever wrote. It ran to over a hundred thirty pages and included details of multiple editions, translations, and a dizzying array of cross-references. It was — and still is — an unprecedented visualization of Hobsbawm’s productivity and commercial success.

The story behind this remarkable document goes back to the early 1980s. At the time, some of Hobsbawm’s students and colleagues prepared an edited volume to celebrate his retirement from Birkbeck College, London. As the two editors — Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones — started to put the book together, they realized that one way to mark Hobsbawm’s contribution was to commission someone to prepare a comprehensive bibliography of his writings. They invited Keith, then a labor historian and frequent attendee at Hobsbawm’s Social History seminar at London’s Institute of Historical Research, to undertake the work.

Even in the early 1980s, this was an enormous task. Hobsbawm had published numerous books — single-authored and edited — and he had been involved in myriad editorial projects, ranging from the historical journal Past & Present to the multiauthor, multi-volume Storia del marxismo (History of Marxism) series, instigated by the Italian publisher Einaudi. Most of all, he had published a bewildering number of essays, articles, and reviews across a range of international publications.