You Could Look It Up (2 page)

What, exactly, is a reference book? In 1911, the librarian Gilbert Ward offered a succinct explanation: “Definition of a reference book.—A reference book is a book which is used for looking up particular points rather than for reading through.”
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Most books get their worth from their entirety, and it makes no sense to read just chapter 37 of
Don Quixote
or book 11, chapter 5 of
The Brothers Karamazov
. Reference works, on the other hand, are meant to be useful in pieces. Information is extracted from its original context, sliced, and rearranged, with the important level of organization being not the book or the chapter but the “entry,” which is expected to make sense on its own. These entries are usually organized arbitrarily, designed to be conveniently located in answering questions that users might ask. That word “users” is a significant one: most books have readers, but reference books have users. Still, it is not always easy to draw a line between reference works and others. Is a cookbook a reference book? An anthology? Almost any compilation could count. In fact, any book in the world can become a reference book if we read in it to find a specific piece of information. But a proper reference book is designed to facilitate consultation rather than reading through.

Of course, a reference book need not even be a book. The works I discuss here include many garden-variety books, but there are also four-ton slabs of basalt and globally interconnected networks of semiconductors. Reference works have taken the form of stone tablets, papyrus scrolls, and numerical tables. They can be as grand as multivolume encyclopedias prepared by learned academies or as homely
as stock reports and racing forms on cheap newsprint. Even
TV Guide
, issued for more than half a century as a weekly magazine, is a kind of reference work. And of course the most important reference works of the last few decades have been in electronic form, first on diskettes, then on
CD
-
ROM
s, and now on the Internet. “Book” is a more elegant word than “text,” so I’ll use it in this work, but usually in this expanded sense.

You Could Look It Up
does not pretend to be comprehensive, touching on all the world’s important reference works—no book could do that. Instead, it contains accounts of fifty great works I find interesting, maybe because they are the first of their kind, maybe the biggest, or the most learned, or the most controversial, or the most influential, or maybe just the most eccentric or quixotic. I have borrowed my method from the ancient biographer Plutarch: each of the twenty-five chapters focuses on an exemplary pair of major reference works. Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives
put important Greeks next to important Romans (Theseus and Romulus, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, Demosthenes and Mark Antony) and then explored the similarities and differences between them to highlight what was distinct about each figure. In my pairings I choose two more or less contemporary works on related subjects and set them in their historical context. Limiting my main discussion to just fifty books means many things are neglected. The reference house has many mansions, and I have had to omit too many important works, even whole genres: almanacs, timelines, biographical dictionaries, price guides, gazetteers, calendars, bibliographies, dictionaries of slang and regionalisms, faux reference books such as Ambrose Bierce’s
Devil’s Dictionary
, compendia of proverbs, and thesauruses did not make the cut. But I do get to discuss some of the most famous reference works—the dictionaries of Johnson, Webster, and the Grimms, Diderot’s
Encyclopédie
and the
Encyclopædia Britannica
, Gray’s
Anatomy
—with attention to what made them so noteworthy and, whenever it can be known, the personalities behind the books. Besides the central pair, each chapter touches on other relevant works, setting the major books in a longer historical context—sometimes looking back centuries to the origins of the form, sometimes
looking ahead to the present day. Tucked between the chapters are shorter interludes that introduce stories that would otherwise go untold in a strictly linear history. In telling fifty little stories, I hope one big story emerges, as well as histories of some of the major reference genres—dictionary, encyclopedia, atlas, and so on.

I repeatedly ask a few questions: What need prompted someone to bring all this information together in one place? Who decided to rise to the challenge? What made them the right people for the job—or, at least, what made them think they were qualified? How did they go about their work? What carried them through the years, even decades, of work it took to compile these often million-word-plus compendia? What is in these books, and what is omitted? What did the world make of them? Finally, and most important, what do they tell us about the mentalities of the ages that produced and used them?

You Could Look It Up
is both a history of and a love letter to the great dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases. It is also, I fear, something of a eulogy: we may be approaching the end of the era of the reference book. That is not to say reference is dead—in the information age it is more essential than ever. But the references of the future almost certainly will not be books in the traditional sense. Every technological revolution has shaken up the organization of information. Advances such as alphabetical order, page numbers, tables of contents, and indexes made it possible to organize old information for new purposes—and, as a side effect, revealed the limitations of the old technologies. As we begin thinking about new ways we might use an old book, we discover new things we would like to do with it, new ways of searching it.

The change we are living through now, in which hard-copy dictionaries and encyclopedias are becoming harder and harder to sell and publishers are scrambling to figure out what will work online, makes it all the more urgent that we understand the history of the genre. “As the information banks available on our computers expand vertiginously in the present,” writes Anthony Grafton, “we have realized that we do not understand the ways in which information was created and transmitted in the past. New forms of cultural history are taking shape to
fill this gap: histories that emphasize not the formal content of ideas but the institutions and practices that enabled them to be created and transmitted.”
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Whenever I quote works in English I follow original spellings, including those of foreign names and titles, except when they require special characters and diacritical marks that are not available in most typefaces—there I have used the closest equivalents available to me. Outside quotations, I give names and titles in the most familiar forms. I provide the sources of all quotations in the endnotes, though when the source is obvious from context—when I quote the definition for
apron
in John Kersey’s
New English Dictionary
, for example—I do not bother with notes. A handful of uncited quotations from living writers came from personal communication, and uncited translations from French, Italian, Spanish, German, Latin, and Greek are my own.

I’ve scattered some “vital statistics” about the major titles throughout the book: boxes give the full title of each reference work, the person primarily responsible for it, the principle on which it is organized, and the date of publication of the first edition. To give some idea of relative sizes, I give the number of volumes, pages, and entries, and, whenever I can manage, the physical size and even the weight of the book, along with the total surface area of all the pages, counting both front and back. (It’s usually impossible to give measurements for books from before the age of print, and even printed books can be bound or trimmed differently, so consider the numbers approximations.) Word count is the total number of words, not merely the number of entries. (This book is around 140,000 words; the
Encyclopédie
would fill about 142 volumes this size, and Pauly-Wissowa is about 392 times longer than this book.) If the book had an afterlife, I give the latest edition. Round numbers are my best estimates; precise figures mean someone has counted, usually with the aid of a computer.

CHAPTER
1

JUSTICE IN THE EARTH

Laws of the Ancient World

A list as pithy as the Ten Commandments fits comfortably in the memory. It can be learned quickly and passed on by oral tradition. As a society grows increasingly complex, though, a short list of thou-shalt-nots is insufficient.

It is easy to forbid murder, for instance, even to guarantee an eye for an eye. But how to settle the terms of a no-fault divorce, or establish a fair price for caulking a boat, or adjudicate rival claims about agricultural fees after a storm destroys much of a crop? As legal precedents multiply, as finer and finer distinctions arise, as more and more circumstances have to be accounted for, it becomes impossible for even the wisest sage to keep everything in his head. The most capacious memory eventually breaks down.

Laws, therefore, were among the first things to be written down in every literate society—and eventually those written laws grew long and complex enough to demand a reference book to make sense of them. Legal compendia are among the foundational reference works in nearly every civilization, and they take us back to some of the earliest known writing in the world. This chapter focuses on two important ancient legal codes, Hammurabi’s
Code
of Babylonian law and the greatest attempt to codify the laws of ancient Rome. Together the codes of these long-gone societies give us insights into daily life that we cannot get through any other channels.