In an Upper West Side Manhattan apartment reportedly bursting with books, file folders, news clippings, and index cards, Joseph Nathan Kane spent several decades compiling some of the most widely used reference works in publishing history. In 1933, the H.W. Wilson Company published his first book, Famous First Facts. Containing about 3,000 entries describing first discoveries, inventions, and other landmark events, this 757-page volume elicited the following enthusiastic comment in a New York Times review: “It was surely a happy inspiration that set Joseph Nathan Kane at the task of producing so intriguing a volume, and a dogged resolution of almost superhuman force that kept him at work so incessantly grilling until it was finished.”
More than 75 years later, this work is now in its sixth edition, and after Kane died in 2002, it was edited by Steven Angovin (now also deceased) and his wife, Janet Podell.
Today, in sharp contrast to the past era of single-author reference works, Wikipedia touts itself as a Web-based reference-encyclopedia project “written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers” who number in the tens of thousands. Unfortunately, this Web site written by many, which often provides useful information, is occasionally marred by factual inaccuracies (some deliberately fabricated by disingenuous writers) and by polemical prose. Not surprisingly, those problems are an inevitable consequence when unnamed contributors can so easily publish online articles.
Such concerns about the reliability of this and other online-research resources should inspire us to pay retrospective and long-overdue tribute to the “superhuman force” of reference-book authors who have spent years and occasionally decades—Kane researched his first book for almost 10 years—methodically combing library stacks and card catalogs to produce authoritative reference works. Although some reference-book authors, like (John) Bartlett and (Peter) Roget, are so well known that they became eponyms, Kane and some others didn’t achieve that much-deserved recognition.
After the publication of his first book, Kane—who hosted a popular 1930s radio program also called Famous First Facts and later submitted questions to the television program The $64,000 Question—researched, compiled, and eventually wrote almost 50 other works, including Facts About the Presidents (now in its eighth edition), Facts About the States, and Nicknames and Sobriquets of U.S. Cities, States, and Counties, to name only a few.
Kane’s unusual métier was shared by another prodigious researcher, who possibly may have seen him (or even spoken with him) at the main reading room of the New York Public Library. For a half-century, Norbert Pearlroth spent almost 10 hours a day, six days a week researching facts for the syndicated column “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” His prodigious research was later published in dozens of paperback books throughout the world. Although these works have been dismissed as mere popular entertainment, Pearlroth is still regarded as one of the most indefatigable and meticulous researchers of factual information.
A Polish Jew who was fluent in more than a dozen languages, Pearlroth used his multilingual talents to track down errant facts and stories for the popular column. His research skills were remarkable—he once published a letter to The New York Times correcting an erroneous citation about the first use of the word “television.” (The word was initially used in 1900, not in 1909, as the paper had claimed.) Despite his indispensable work for Robert Ripley, Pearlroth’s name was rarely mentioned in any of the legendary entrepreneur’s columns or books. He reportedly received no royalties for his research, even though Ripley’s books sold millions of copies.
Reference works are often partially defined as books that are consulted and not read, and their history long predates the admirable toils of Kane and Pearlroth. Dictionaries, the most popular reference works, have presented daunting challenges to the very select group of remarkable scholars and researchers who have embarked on this lexical adventure.
In 1755, Samuel Johnson solely compiled A Dictionary of the English Language, the first reliable and comprehensive dictionary of the language. He expected this mammoth project to last almost three years, but it took him nearly a decade to collect and edit the 42,000 entries.
The publication of that dictionary revolutionized the field of lexicography. Almost 75 years later, Noah Webster labored for a quarter of a century to create An American Dictionary of the English Language, which earned linguistic respect for residents of the former British colonies. Although James Murray, the brilliant polymath who helped create The Oxford English Dictionary, didn’t attain eponymous status for his massive work, the OED is the pre-eminent dictionary, which established lexicographical standards.
The late 19th century seemed to mark the heyday of reference works by a single author. Published in 1870, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable was praised by a British newspaper for offering “the rare attraction in a book of reference of being thoroughly readable.” The Rev. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, a British schoolmaster and author, collected numerous phrases and sayings—some often left out of other works—and thus educated many readers, who may or may not have attended college, about both uncommon and unknown literary allusions. The phrase “killed by kindness,” for example, is reportedly derived from the legend that Draco, a popular Athenian legislator, met his death in 590 BC after being smothered by cloaks thrown by admiring spectators.
In 1891, the legal scholar Henry Campbell Black researched and wrote A Dictionary of Law. Now called Black’s Law Dictionary, this century-old work has been updated and revised several times and still remains the standard legal lexicon.
The deadpan comedian Steven Wright once asked, “What is a synonym for ‘thesaurus’?” The word does indeed appear in the most popular (but not earliest) such work, entitled Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, published in London in 1852. It was compiled by the 73-year-old Peter Mark Roget, who had an illustrious career as a physician, scientist, and science writer. His name soon became generic for subsequent synonym dictionaries, just as Webster’s moniker had for general dictionaries. Roget’s first thesaurus was so popular that it was published in three editions during the 1850s. Most interesting, Roget’s tragic family life raised questions about his motives for compiling such a work. One modern biographer claimed—although never definitively proved—that the tedious and time-consuming research for the thesaurus helped Roget to ward off possible madness, which could have been brought on by his father’s early death, his uncle’s suicide, and his living with both a mentally unbalanced mother and grandmother.
Whatever his motivation, crossword-puzzle enthusiasts and writers are forever grateful. Indeed, Sylvia Plath once characterized her thesaurus as the book she “would rather live with on a desert isle than a bible.” Dylan Thomas also sometimes mined Roget.
If lexicography helped stir the imagination and intellectual curiosity of generations of scholars and researchers, the creation of quotation books also excited many enterprising individuals. John Bartlett—widely known for his remarkable erudition—was the owner of a Cambridge, Mass., bookstore, where Harvard professors and casual visitors frequently asked him for the provenance of various quotations. In 1855 he compiled and published the Collection of Familiar Quotations for his friends. After he self-published the first three editions, the Boston publishing firm of Little, Brown issued all subsequent editions, now entitled Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and has been doing so for more than a 150 years.
More than a century and a half after Bartlett’s first volume, the Yale Law School librarian Fred R. Shapiro employed both painstaking book research along with modern library technology to produce landmark quotation books. His Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations soon became the standard work for law quotations, and later his mammoth Yale Book of Quotations emerged as the pre-eminent general quotation reference work. A regular contributor to the Yale Alumni Magazine, Shapiro once mentioned in an interview his favorite find: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”
Other noteworthy reference-book authors include Barbara Ann Kipfer, a Hoosier with doctorates in both linguistics and anthropology, who single-handedly compiled almost a dozen language works, including Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus. She also wrote the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archaeology, praised by a major academic journal as “one of the most comprehensive archaeological dictionaries available” and a fascinating and unique Roget-like work with classified and subdivided lists: The Order of Things: How Everything in the World Is Organized Into Hierarchies, Structures, and Pecking Orders.
Then there is Paul Dickson. Besides his popular reference works on baseball, this freelance writer has compiled many other engaging books, including The Official Rules, a unique collection with meticulously sourced entries on the origin of Murphy’s law and lesser-known folk laws. He also wrote Labels for Locals: What to Call People From Abilene to Zimbabwe, a delightful treat for geographical-word lovers. Place-name lovers across the Atlantic have their own maven: Adrian Room, a British author, has written more than 50 books on geographical place names—known as toponymy—and is considered the most esteemed toponymist in the world.
Ben Schott, also British but much younger than Room, has recently ascended the stratospheric book-sale heights for reference works by a single author. In 2002, his Schott’s Original Miscellany—an eclectic compendium of facts and engaging information—became an international bestseller, with more than two million copies sold and translated into several languages. The book includes a dazzling array of information: classifications of icebergs by size, international clothes-washing symbols, instructions about how to wrap a sari, and so forth. This title was soon followed by Schott’s Almanac, an annual reference work that reinvents the traditional almanac, presenting each year as a “mix of both trivial and significant events,” as described in an admiring Library Journal review.
Unsurprisingly, Schott’s publishing style, personal interests, and approach to fame are also unusual: He typesets his own books, collects cufflinks, and reportedly drives a 1967 Mercedes. When the men’s fashion magazine GQ voted him “Man of the Year” in 2003 and asked him to attend a party with Elton John and other celebrities at the Royal Opera House to receive the award, he declined. As he explained: “I thought there’s no way on earth I’m going to do this. Why would I want to? ... There would be all these incredibly famous people, and then there would be me. Would that make me happy? Would that make the books better? What’s the point?”
As Google users confidently type keywords in the search box and often uncritically assume the veracity of the results, they may be ignorant of the crucial, meticulous research performed by Joseph Nathan Kane, Norbert Pearlroth, and others—both earlier and later—who strived to publish authoritative information. Since computers have made many people think that all knowledge is only a keystroke away, it is well worth remembering the question Kane continually posed to his high-school teachers after they pronounced something a fact: “How do you know?”
