Denis Hollier’s collective work A New History of French Literature (1989) has a conventional-sounding title, but is anything but conventional in its arrangement. Instead of a chronological narrative, which is what the title suggests, or an A to Z listing of …
An Illustrated Dictionary of Architecture: sounds like the perfect combination, a book combining text with pictures just when you need it. Compiled by two experienced …
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Philip Thody and Howard Evans: Faux Amis and Key Words: a dictionary-guide to French Language, Culture and Society (1985) (published in the US as Mistakable French)
Reference books for learning a language include some of the dullest titles ever …
Reading Time: < 1 minuteReviews to be posted in the new few weeks include:
Encyclopedias of the Enlightenment
– there are several; this batch enables a typical French academic reference to be compared with a volume for the US college market.
Dictionnaire de la …
Reading Time: 3 minutesA good idea of the current position of reference publishing from a publisher’s perspective could be seen from a seminar on reference publishing (21 March 2012), at University College, London (part of the Digital Publishing Forum series), conceived and chaired by …
Reading Time: < 1 minuteEvery reference editor in the world dreams of writing the following entry. Lost in the middle of a vast multi-volume encyclopedia, who would notice such an innocent-seeming entry? But it reveals the circularity of so much reference publishing.
…AGUAXIMA, (Hist.
Here is the entry for “oak” from Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates, 1873 edition. This reference book, unique to the best of my knowledge, combines a brief definition or background, usually very brief, and some interesting significant dates around the topic. Here, …
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI used to think that reference publishing was somewhat out of date; that nobody produces reference works nowadays, ever since Wikipedia took over the encyclopedia market.
But it is clear that reference publishing is not dead. It has changed, with …
Reading Time: < 1 minute
There are a few rules for compiling reference works, and the utility of the publication is woefully compromised if those rules are not followed.
The Oxford Companion to British Railway History (1997) is a great book, and fascinating reading, but …
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