In the winter of 1997 Luis Gásser (see : Acknowledgements) approached me to collaborate on a project about Joseph fernando Macari sor Montadas (°13.02.1778 - † 10.07.1839) (common name fernando sor), of which he was the editor-in-chief and to which several authors would contribute. My part was to compile a bibliography of articles, studies and other publications.

Literature about Fernando Sor was not unknown to me given my studies concerning his collected works. However, I did not dispose of a thorough systematic classification. After some hesitations and a preliminary study, I decided to accept the invitation. The idea of including the bibliography in the project was subsequently abandoned.

Bibliographic data about Fernando Sor are dispersed. They are mostly characterised by their brevity. I attempted to solve these problems by trying to collect “all” publications (see : Introduction - A Bibliography) and compiling detailed descriptions. Accordingly I inspected periodicals, reference works and other publications, mainly in the massive library of the faculteit der letteren van de Rijksuniversiteit utrecht (Faculty of Arts of Utrecht University), Utrecht, (Department Utrecht) in the Netherlands. I found data that could not be verified by checking with the source documents. For that I sought the help of colleagues, who also supplied me with new material.

I developed a classification system based on that of the new Grove dictionary of Music and Musicians. The bibliographic descriptions conform to the international standard Bibliographic description for Monographic Publications and [id.] for Printed Music (ISBD-M and ISBD-PM) (see : Glossary - Paris Principals). For the setting and spellings I followed principally Hart's rules for compositors and readers at the university Press oxford (see : consulted literature-i : Hart's Rules).

The listing of documents was finished in the Spring of 2002 while refinements to the manuscript continued. An update, based on the RilM-online, was performed in March 2006 in the library of the université de toulouse - le Mirail (toulouse-ii), Toulouse, (Department Haute-Garonne), France. A second update took place in December 2006, in collaboration with Luis Gásser, who called my attention to some recent and planned publications of symphonic works by Sor. Further revisions were carried out in 2008.

Since then, circumstances beyond my control caused a rather long delay before the manuscript could finally be published, during which it became out-of-date.