In Praise of Reference Books
Reference volumes should be valued as least as much as fiction and other nonfiction books
Discussions of reading habits typically break down, at least in the first instance, along the binary of fiction and nonfiction. If you ask most people what they read, they’ll give you some version of “mostly fiction” or “mostly nonfiction,” perhaps with some caveats and clarifications.
If you dig deeper, you’ll find out if they like their fiction of a more literary or more pedestrian variety (or something niche like fantasy or mystery), or which manner of nonfiction appeals to them (for instance, biography or economic history, or perhaps books about a specific time or place).
Embedded in this response is a dichotomous view of what books should be, or rather what they are for. Fiction tells interesting stories, usually about interesting people, ideally with some greater lessons or connection to the human condition; nonfiction offers information about the real world, past or present, in a manner that makes a coherent and easily summarized argument. Of course, there’s some blurring here and there, but both types of books generally are structured according to the conventions of their subgenres and can be easily categorized and taxonomized.
I write today in praise of a third genre that few self-respecting intellectuals admit to reading regularly, though many do: the reference book.
As a child, I voraciously read from books in the 000 section of our school library; in the parlance of the Dewey Decimal system, this was where “Generalities” and “Knowledge” is housed. Most of these books are reference books in nature; that is, they are meant to be perused and consulted, not read cover to cover. Later in life, I found out that many of my friends (especially those who are weird and heterodox and maybe a little bit neuroatypical) gravitated to this section as well, sometimes spending hours reading books all the way through, even though they were not intended to be read that way.
The 000 section has everything a young (weird) mind needs to develop what my Cubmaster once called my “endless font of useless knowledge.” Section 030 is “General encyclopedic works”—almanacs, fact books and of course multivolume encyclopedias. (If you had deeply held opinions on Britannica versus World Book versus Funk & Wagnalls as a child: Congratulations, you’re one of us.) Section 000 was computer science, and in the late 1980s, perusing that section was like gazing into the future. Over in 001.9 one found “controversial knowledge”: UFOs, monsters, parapsychology, the Bermuda Triangle, that sort of thing. I lost a nontrivial amount of sleep due to what I read in 001.9.
Reference books have lost a lot of ground in the past decades to digital replacements. Today, World Book is the only remaining publisher of hard-copy general reference encyclopedias. Wikipedia, while not without benefit (it’s actually one of the great human achievements of the past quarter-century), also comes at a cost. Encyclopedias are written to provide a thorough overview of almost any subject one can name, and entries are usually of the right length and format to be read through in one sitting, like a magazine article. By contrast, hyperlinks incentivize peripatetic clicking; when was the last time you read a Wikipedia article from top to bottom without clicking away (or being distracted by alerts from email, direct messages, and the like)?
Reference books are discontinuous expressions (assuming writers and editors are acting in good faith) of what is known or believed at the time they are published. Think of the still much-loved 11th edition of Britannica (1910-1911), which contains articles by a host of famous writers, from T.H. Huxley to G.K. Chesterton. Changing physical reference books after publication is incredibly high cost, typically involving errata slips that must be manually added.
By contrast, digital works can be edited, and inconvenient facts memory-holed, more or less on an editorial whim. Encyclopedia Britannica (now exclusively online) and most online dictionaries (including Merriam-Webster, also exclusively digital) are revised frequently and usually without much if any acknowledgement, due not to errors of omission but to audience capture and the demands of vibeoepistemology, or knowledge derived from vibes. These are no longer reference works in the traditional sense; rather, they are expressions of a zeitgeist. As if we needed more of those.
Real reference books are unpretentious, which is part of their charm. What’s more, they know what they are. Their compilers, authors and editors are by and large anonymous. Most people can name 50 fiction and nonfiction authors before they can name one author of a modern generalist reference work.
There are exceptions, of course. E.D. Hirsch and Stewart Brand are among the few editors of reference works with even modest fame; the latter’s declaration in his Whole Earth Catalog that “We are as gods and might as well get good at it” is perhaps the only recognizable quotation from any reference volume, while the title of Hirsch’s book, “Cultural Literacy,” has entered the vernacular. Both started movements with their reference books and demonstrated what a unique vision, excellent curation and deft editorial skills could accomplish.
Because of that unpretentiousness, reference books carry no demands, possess no sartorial aesthetic. By contrast, an obnoxious essay printed recently in the Financial Times on reading offered advice that one must “[not] read fewer than 50 pages in a sitting” and quoted Philip Roth with admiration: “If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel.” (Without wading into controversies regarding childbearing and cat ladies, neither the author of that essay nor Roth had any children, who are a primary source of lectio interruptus.)
Pish! and Feh! say the reference books. Pick us up as you will and read as much or as little as you choose. Sit in a library and leaf through our pages. Look up a quick item. There are even reference books published specifically for when you’re indisposed, as they say.
No toff has written an essay about how to best leaf through “Baseball Field Guide: An In-Depth Illustrated Guide to the Complete Rules of Baseball,” a book which I recommend and which provided the inspiration for this rant. I discovered Martin Gilbert’s “Atlas of British History” in a charity shop for £1 and have taken more from it than many “serious” books, a few charts and maps at a time. John Man’s “Atlas of the Year 1000” is the kind of volume that’s too interesting to be left to proper historians and is valuable and interesting both to novices and experts (for there is no one who is truly an expert on the globe of the 11th century).
And therein lies the joy of reference books: You as the reader can make them comply with the demands of your knowledge, intellect and time constraints, not vice versa. We have all continued slogging through books we weren’t really enjoying because we were a third of the way through and it didn’t seem right to not finish them. (Yes, this is an example of the sunk cost fallacy—it’s also a very human fallacy, especially in an environment in which reading is gamified by completion).
Nobody has ever scolded themselves for failure to complete a reference book. They are intended to be used as the reader demands—nothing more. You owe no obeisance to the author; there is no pretense of a conversation.
Some books present themselves as nonfiction books when they are in fact reference books and can profitably be treated as such. This is frequently the case with one-volume generalist histories of countries, regions or complex phenomena. “A New History of India” by Rudrangshu Mukherjee et al. is a tremendous volume. But given the scale of the subject, and that the book is replete with photographs and maps, it is best treated as a reference book that one can dip in and out of. I’ve probably read half of the total words in the book, and not at all in order.
Some reference books are better than others, and the best ones are truly excellent. But there’s no self-congratulatory sense that even mediocre writers are engaged in some sort of “craft.”
Recent graduates from Bennington don’t crawl over their friends and loved ones to earn $28k a year as junior slush pile reviewers at World Book.
There is no Iowa Reference Writers’ Workshop.
Curated well, organized logically, illustrated with appropriate diagrams and maps, reference books can be a joy. And I suspect they’re a joy that many of us share, even if we are loath to say so publicly for fear of being labeled midwitted.
I have learned a tremendous amount from reference books, often in unexpected ways, and I assume many very successful, intelligent and erudite folks have had similar dalliances with the triple-aughts. Perhaps we should normalize the joy of leafing through reference books as an intellectual endeavor at least as worthwhile as reading a good biography or novel.
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