A recent ALPSP meeting (February 2015) included a talk about the future of reference publishing. The speaker, David Hughes, is Editorial Director for Major Works at John Wiley, so he should know. He stated the major competition to paid-access reference …
Author: Michael Upshall Page 2 of 3
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Tom McArthur’s book is essential reading in the world of reference, although perhaps that is faint praise for a subject that has so few books dedicated to it. However, reading the book is tough going. The author makes it difficult for …
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I’ve been reading about the French Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, in the lovely illustrated Gallimard Decouvertes volume authored by Francois Moureau, which he entitles Le roman vrai de l’Encyclopédie [ The real novel of the Encyclopedia], first published 1990). …
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(This post first appeared at consultmu.co.uk in June 2013)
Bertelsmann’s announcement of the closure of Brockhaus encyclopedias (June 2013) is indeed the end of an era. The Brockhaus encyclopedia style was fundamentally different to that of Britannica. While of similar size, …
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Astute readers of Wikipedia, or even readers who are half asleep, cannot have failed to notice the prominent notice at the top of every Wikipedia article at present (March 3rd, 2014). Undisclosed paid editing is what Wikipedia is trying to stamp …
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Everyone remembers the memorable subtitle of Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That. The two “genuine dates” are of course 55BC and 1066. It was true when the book was written (1930) and today that these are the two most …
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We all know what confession means: the Catholic ritual by which sinners gain absolution for their sins, by confessing to a priest. John Cornwell’s recent history of Confession, The Dark Box (Basic Books, 2014) contains three key dates, very helpfully extracted …
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Here is a story about a brand of toothpaste and Wikipedia, and how the brand of toothpaste won. It is a salutary lesson, not for the toothpaste, but for Wikipedia – except I don’t imagine anyone from Wikipedia has noticed.
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The remarkable (and almost accidental) nature of this book was revealed very clearly quite by chance, in David Thomson’s obituary of the publisher Tom Rosenthal, who died in January 2004. In it he described the genesis of the Biographical Dictionary of …
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Here is Jean-Paul Sartre, aged around 10 or 11, sitting in his grandfather’s library and discovering the books there. At that age, I think I was mainly looking at the pictures. For Sartre, encyclopedias represented something far more significant.…