Originally limited to literary studies, the BDSL was first published in 1957 by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, initiated and edited by the then Frankfurt library director Hanns W. Eppelsheimer. His successor in office, Clemens Köttelwesch, took over the bibliographical task a year later and finally expanded the cataloguing basis to include German linguistics in 1969. The BDSL is still known under the names of the first two editors as Eppelsheimer-Köttelwesch.