You Could Look It Up (19 page)

The Renaissance marked an epoch for mapmaking, and Ortelius was one of the most important figures. In the words of one historian, “The period of cartographic incunabula, characterized by a slavish following of old doctrines and strongly influenced by Ptolemy, was closed. The new period trusted the knowledge of the earth to first hand exploration and scientific investigation rather than to ancient classics.”
16
Historians of cartography sometimes refer to this period as the Dutch era, because maps from the Netherlands dominated the world trade in maps—but soon the maps would dominate the world. Kings and princes went on to use cartography to create a consciousness of the nation-state as a coherent entity, one that could be made visible on a wall.
17

Bayer’s work, meanwhile, has been continued by countless astronomers since, and today’s biggest astronomical catalog, USNO-B1.0, contains just over a billion items. This is around 640,000 times as many as the 1,564 in
Uranometria
, and the catalog itself is about twice the size of the whole of the English Wikipedia. Even this, though, represents a tiny fraction of the stars that exist in the universe. No one knows an exact number, and astronomers argue about even the order of magnitude. One plausible guess of the number of stars, though, puts the figure at seventy sextillion—70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 × 10
22
. To put this in context, there are roughly a thousand stars in the sky for every grain of sand on the earth. Even the Brobdingnagian USNO-B1.0 has covered only around 0.0000000000015 percent of the estimated total. Astronomers therefore have a lot more work ahead of them. Even if all seven billion people on the planet were put to work around the clock, held to an assembly-line pace of cataloging one star per minute, it would take them about 19 million years to get through them all. What’s more, a recent discovery suggests we might have to triple our best guess about the number of stars in the universe.
18
If that turns out to be true, the seven billion of us working on the problem will not get a breather for 38 million years more.

CHAPTER
7 ½

TELL ME HOW YOU ORGANIZE YOUR BOOKS

I've defined reference books in terms of how individual readers use them, but there's also an institutional definition: reference books are the ones that never leave the library.
1
That's good news for those inside the library, but it can be disconcerting to those outside. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and all sorts of guides have their passionate devotees—Sean Pidgeon, a novelist and reference publisher, confesses, “I am addicted to looking things up”
2
—and for junkies like him, waiting until the next library trip to look up a pressing item is simply unthinkable. Reference addicts keep the books they need close at hand. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, and David Foster Wallace have spent their lives inside encyclopedias, dictionaries, concordances, and atlases. “I'm told that when Auden died,” biographer Francis Steegmuller wrote in
1980
, “they found his
OED
all but clawed to pieces. That is the way a poet and his dictionary should go out.” Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, had little interest in the
OED
; he was a partisan of
Webster's Second New International Dictionary
(
1934
). After growing weary of using it only in the library, he bought a copy of the bulky volume and took it with him even when he traveled.
3

Where to keep them? In his book-length ode to reference books,
Dictionary Days
, Ilan Stavans wrote, “An aphorism comes to mind: ‘Tell me how you organize your books and I'll tell you who you are.' Thus said a teacher of mine years ago.” Stavans confesses that his own shelves are a mess, with a significant exception: his dictionaries. “An entire wall is filled with them. These volumes seek perfection … they systematize knowledge.”
4

Princeton historian Anthony Grafton may win the contest for most interesting home reference section, thanks to a six-foot-tall “book
wheel” or “reading wheel,” modeled on a contraption designed by European scholars in the late sixteenth century. “Think of a small Ferris wheel,” writes a reporter who has seen it, “with shelves instead of seats”; the shelves rotate, like the cars on a Ferris wheel, so that the books always remain upright. “From his seat he can rotate any one of eight shelves into view by spinning the wheel. With a tug, Grafton rotates past Greek, Latin, and Hebrew lexicons until a book on eclipses drops into view. ‘Not everyone has
Eclipses for Humanists
,' he observes dryly.”
5

While I wait for the opportunity to get my own book wheel, I keep the bulk of my reference collection in the study, directly over the computer where I do most of my writing. The ones I use most often are on the lowest of the four shelves, so I can reach them without standing up. There I keep
The Oxford Companion to English Literature
in both the fifth and sixth editions; there, too, the
Oxford Classical Dictionary
, third edition (soon to be replaced by the fourth);
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
, eleventh edition;
Chambers Biographical Dictionary
;
The Chicago Manual of Style
, sixteenth edition;
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable
, centenary edition;
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
;
The Oxford Companion to the Year
;
The Oxford Companion to the English Language
; and the major foreign language dictionaries:
Le nouveau petit Robert
, Duden's
Deutsches universal Wörterbuch
, and Zingarelli's
Vocabolario della lingua italiana
, along with a handful of bilingual dictionaries from Oxford, Webster, and Langenscheidt. The next two shelves contain works I need less often, maybe once a week—things I can reach simply by standing up. There I keep Bergen and Cornelia Evans's
Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage
;
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary
; the
MLA Handbook
; dictionaries of languages I need less often (
A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament
,
The Learner's Russian–English Dictionary
), the systematic reference grammars (Allen and Greenough's
New Latin Grammar
, the
Oxford English Grammar
, Zanichelli's
Lingua italiana
,
Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer
), the guides to usage and citation formats (Fowler and Fowler's
King's English
, Strunk and White's
Elements of Style
), specialized English dictionaries (Eric Partridge's
Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
), and miscellaneous references (Wellisch's
Indexing from A to Z
, the
NBC Handbook of Pronunciation
, Alberto
Manguel's
Dictionary of Imaginary Places
). The top shelf is too high to reach without a stepping stool; I use it for the reference books I consult every few months or less, such as the
Concise Encyclopedia of Heraldry
, the
English–Norwegian, Norwegian–English Dictionary
, and a grammar of Irish Gaelic. Some of these, truth be told, have acquired a layer of dust.

The latest
Chambers Dictionary
is just an inch too tall for my shelves, so it lies on its side.
Webster's Third New International
is far too tall to fit on a shelf, and its weight would make it dangerous for me to try to take it down from overhead. It sits on the floor to my left, blocking access to a filing cabinet and leaning up against a facsimile of Webster's
American Dictionary of the English Language
from 1828. My facsimile of Johnson's
Dictionary of the English Language
from 1755 is on the floor behind me, leaning on the bookcase devoted to Samuel Johnson's works. Other heavyweights—the
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
, the new
Oxford Latin Dictionary
, Liddell and Scott's
Greek–English Lexicon
in both the intermediate and full versions—have to go on top of a row of bookcases. The famous eleventh edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
(1911) would occupy too much space in the study; its twenty-nine volumes are downstairs. My old
Compact OED
, with its magnifying glass—now obsolete, but I've had it since I was a freshman and can't bear to part with it—and the fourth and fifth editions of
The American Heritage Dictionary
rest on top of a filing cabinet.

Of course I keep plenty of works on the computer. I had the third edition of the
American Heritage Dictionary
installed on my hard drive starting in the DOS days of the early 1990s, and now I have a number of important reference works bookmarked in my Web browser: the
Oxford English Dictionary
, Merriam-Webster, the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, and the
English Short-Title Catalogue
, among many others. And of course Google and Wikipedia are perennially available. My iPhone also has the electronic versions of Merriam-Webster's
Collegiate
,
American Heritage
,
Chambers
, the
Larousse
for French, and versions of Liddell and Scott's Greek lexicon and Lewis and Short's Latin dictionary, as well as a smattering of less impressive bilingual dictionaries for quick lookups, and the Wikipedia app. I rarely go more than an hour or two without using one of them.

CHAPTER
8

ADMIRABLE ARTIFICE

Computers before Computers

“Math class is tough!” So declared the Teen Talk Barbie doll in
1992
, enraging a generation of feminists who despaired of finding children’s toys that did not reinforce harmful gender stereotypes. But Barbie was right: math is hard.

If it is not quite so tough for us today, that is because we are spoiled by tiny computers that go with us everywhere. In the age of the feature-packed mobile phone, we need not even divide a restaurant bill by hand. A computer with more computing power than the entire Apollo program had at its disposal is there to give us an answer as quickly as we can press the buttons. But it has not always been so. For most of history, all calculations were done by hand, because there was no other way to do them.

Books containing page after page of digits may be the most referency of all reference books in their unsuitability for reading through. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, even the phone book can make for entertaining browsing: there is always the hope of coming across amusing names. But it is hard to read more than a few lines in a table of numbers without feeling one’s energy waning, and even the most devoted reference book enthusiast will have trouble with this:

and so on, for 396 folio pages.
1
Hardly gripping reading. And yet such unreadable tables shaped the modern world.

The tables are designed as labor-saving devices: they take the place of long calculations done by hand, allowing us to look up the answers rather than arriving at them manually. In American restaurants, for instance, where a tip of 15 to 20 percent of the bill is customary, many people keep a small laminated card in their wallets on which are 15%, 18%, and 20% tips on various totals. These tip charts are descendants of old-fashioned “ready reckoners,” printed tables that go back centuries and were especially common in countries without metric measurement or decimal coinage.
2
A mercer selling 8½ yards of cloth at 4s. 3d. a yard would be grateful for any shortcut in figuring that the total was £1 16s. 1½d. John Mayne’s
Socius Mercatoris; or, The Merchant’s Companion
(1674) was there to answer the question, as were almanacs and books like
Harris’s Pocket Journal
.