Favourite Reference Books

One of my first books was a free, promotional offer of the "A" volume of the British Children's Encyclopedia The Book of Knowledge. We never got the whole set. To this day I know a disproportionate amount about Alexander and Alfred the Greats. I think there was an entry about Abraham too. I remember it being very British and very Christian.

Obviously,  I love the Oxford English Dictionary. A friend of mine has a t-shirt that says "O.E.D., yeah you know me."

I still have "The Modern Marvels Encyclopedia" by John R. Crossland (no date given inside the book, but was published between annually between 1938 - 1956 as far as I can discern) published in Great Britain. Fantastic photos throughout.

The OED is indeed an Aladdin's cave of linguistic treasures. I'll put in a word for Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, especially the older editions. An edition from the 1960's is available at Chapters at a cut-rate price under the Wordsworth imprint. Not only does the older Brewer's tell you how to faire la sainte Nitouche and give the precise date of Nicka-Nan Night, it is, as far as I know, the only reference work to give a comprehensive listing of German bishops eaten by rats.

Also, the Dictionary of Newfoundland English by Story, Kirwin and Widdowson, now available online at http://www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary/. A monument to a people who took the pinch of deprivation and turned it into silvery wit.

And a few years ago in the "As Is" section of Attic Books in London, I found a mid-nineteenth century edition of Lempriere's Classical Dictionary and paid five dollars for it. It had been well-used: the back had cracked and been mended with electrical tape. It's had a bit more use since then. It's a wonderful guide to the classical world (John Keats's favourite book) and is stuffed with anecdotes and conjecture about the famous, infamous and merely divine.It's probably digitized on Google Books.(poss. under the title Bibliotheca Classica) It also inspired Lempriere's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk, an Eco-ish, vertigo-inducing conspiracy thriller about the East India Company.

Robert B.Reich's newest, After-Shock: The Next Economy and America's Future, will join his Supercapitalism as a reference work to understand what has transpired in the last half-century and how we wound up in the political-economic pickle of today.

I've just begun what will be a short read (146 pages plus notes), but the dust-jacket prepares one somewhat: "When the nation's economy foundered in 2008, blame was directed almost universally at Wall Street. But Robert B.Reich suggests a different reason for the meltdown, and for a perilous road ahead. He argues that the real problem is structural: it lies in the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top, and in a middle class that has had to go deeply into debt to maintain a decond standard of living."

The last time the top 1 per cent of the populatin was paid 23 per cent of the nation's income was 1928. 

"Structural."  And he proposes a "transformation" that will allow a wider sharing of prosperity.  We'll see.