Who’s who and what’s what

Asked to name a reference book, you may well choose the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. But perhaps you’d pick something less elephantine — the Guinness Book of World Records, with its tributes to figures such as Smudge, holder of the record for most keys removed from a keyring by a parrot, or Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which informs us that the Russian equivalent of ‘to carry coals to Newcastle’ is ‘to go to Tula with one’s own samovar’.

The American literature professor Jack Lynch has spent a large part of his life exploring the world of reference books, and in its darker corners has spotted items as recondite as Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich and Rectal Bleeding: A Medical Dictionary, Bibliography and Annotated Research Guide. The former is the brainchild of an author whose other achievements include the surely oxymoronic Astonishing Conservative Thoughts, while the publisher of the latter strays into more far-fetched territory with the claim that, ‘If your time is valuable, this book is for you.’

Assembling even the most humdrum work of reference demands scholarship, punctiliousness and a surprising amount of imagination. You Could Look It Up is Lynch’s ‘love letter to the great dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases’, and is also an elegy for the pre-electronic age in which such volumes were created not by studious committees but by ‘quirky geniuses, revolutionary firebrands and impassioned cultural warriors’.

In each of his 25 chapters Lynch compares two books. Some juxtapositions are easily foreseen: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755, compiled with the help of a few part-time amanuenses, is measured against the 1694 dictionary that took the 40 ‘immortals’ of the Académie française more than 50 years. Others are not so predictable: the Catholic Encyclopedia is paired with a 65-volume work of Soviet propaganda, and the first edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, a messy effort that included a potted history of China, sits alongside Edmond Hoyle’s 1742 A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist.