Jack Lynch. (2016). You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Jack Lynch. 2016. You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Jack Lynch, You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

Jack Lynch. You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Lynch, Jack
   • bioText: Jack Lynch is a professor of English at Rutgers University and a Johnson scholar, having studied the great lexicographer for nearly a decade. In addition to his books on Johnson and on Elizabethan England, he has written journal articles and scholarly reviews, and hosts a Web site devoted to these topics at http://andromeda. rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/. He is the author of Becoming Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson's Insults and the editor of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. He lives in Lawrenceville, NJ.
   • name: Jack Lynch

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You Could Look It Up

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"Knowledge is of two kinds," said Samuel Johnson in 1775. "We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." Today we think of Wikipedia as the source of all information, the ultimate reference. Yet it is just the latest in a long line of aggregated knowledge—reference works that have shaped the way we've seen the world for centuries.

You Could Look It Up chronicles the captivating stories behind these great works and their contents, and the way they have influenced each other. From The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known compendium of laws in ancient Babylon almost two millennia before Christ to Pliny's Natural History; from the 11th-century Domesday Book recording land holdings in England to Abraham Ortelius's first atlas of the world; from Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language to The Whole Earth Catalog to Google, Jack Lynch illuminates the human stories and accomplishment behind each, as well as its enduring impact on civilization. In the process, he offers new insight into the value of knowledge.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content: Lively and erudite . . . Lynch offers a reference book of reference books, a magical volume of infinite regress . . . You Could Look It Up can serve as a reminder of our enduring and impudent desire to keep the chaotic universe in some kind of neat and serviceable order.
2. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: [A] wholly absorbing chronicle of the reference book.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: As readers make their ways through this book, they are certain to discover a wide variety of must-haves . . . Great stuff for anyone who loves knowledge, deep or trivial.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: Anyone who enjoys reference books will embrace this erudite compilation and Lynch's appreciative, fluent commentary.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Washington Post
   • content: No harmless drudge he, [Lynch] takes a broad view of his subject and includes lively pages on several dozen radically different works . . . The serendipity of its contents is part of the book's fun [along with] its high anecdotal and amusement quotient.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Shelf Awareness
   • content: Fascinating . . . You Could Look It Up is a history not simply of reference books as a genre but of the broader question of how we organize information and why.
7. • premium: False
   • source: The American Conservative
   • content: You Could Look It Up is an entertaining, enlightening look into the vast, complex world of reference books and their tireless compilers across the ages, extending far beyond the familiar works of Samuel Johnson, Peter Roget, and Noah Webster.
8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 15, 2016
     

     Lynch (English, Rutgers Univ.; The Lexicographer's Dilemma) relates the stories of 50 major reference works from 1754 BCE to the present, defining "reference" sources as titles that are designed to be used piecemeal to answer a query, rather than read cover to cover. The author pairs works on similar topics and places them into their proper historical and social context, while relating the stories behind their composition. Categories of reference texts explored include laws, dictionaries, maps, encyclopedias, quotations, and trivia. Specific titles range from the familiar (Code of Hammurabi, Wikipedia, Gray's Anatomy) to the lesser known (Historia Plantarum, Bald's Leechbook). In some chapters Lynch reflects on the nature of reference publishing as a whole and illuminates key issues common to the genre: authorship, accuracy, length, and revisions. Intermediate segments also place the sources into a wider social context, considering gender disparities in authorship, ideological and political promotion, and the changing nature of publishing in the Internet age, among others. VERDICT Although Lynch's discussion of specific works can be rather short, he has created an absorbing look into the wide-ranging world of reference resources. Recommended to anyone interested in history or publishing.--Rebekah Kati, Durham, NC

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 2, 2015
     Lynch (The Lexicographer’s Dilemma), a English professor at Rutgers University, gives a lively, learned history of reference books. Admiring their “concentrated wisdom,” Lynch selects 50 key works for being trailblazers, notably controversial, highly influential, or simply eccentric. Using a sometimes puzzling design, he pairs the books and explores them in 25 separate chapters, each followed by a shorter chapter on an associated subject. Lynch successfully matches Diderot’s L’Encyclopédie and Encyclopedia Britannica. More strained is linking Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography with the Domesday Book. Coupling George Grove’s A Dictionary of Music and Musicians with Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society feels particularly contrived. Elsewhere, Lynch contrasts the Académie Française’s precision with Samuel Johnson’s idiosyncrasy, and compares Noah Webster’s American Dictionary to the Grimm brothers’ Deutsches Wörterbuch as exercises in nation building. For science and medicine, Lynch includes Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Gray’s Anatomy, and The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He ends with Wikipedia, which he considers an encyclopedist’s dream come true. Exhibiting a taste for the unusual, he also includes a list of unlikely titles such as the American Rabbit Breeders Association’s Standard of Perfection. Anyone who enjoys reference books will embrace this erudite compilation and Lynch’s appreciative, fluent commentary.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from November 1, 2015
      Lynch (English/Rutgers Univ.; The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English, from Shakespeare to South Park, 2010) shares his love of reference books.Reference books are made for looking up a particular point; they facilitate consultation rather than reading from cover to cover. However, as the author intriguingly demonstrates, it's still fun to grab a volume of the encyclopedia and wander through it. In this entertaining "love letter to the great dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases," Lynch traces the history of reference works from the ancients to Google and Wikipedia. One of the best chapters describes how he organizes his own collection, from those at the ready, like Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, to foreign language and slang dictionaries and the Concise Encyclopedia of Heraldry. As readers make their ways through this book, they are certain to discover a wide variety of must-haves--e.g., Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi's Dictionary of Imaginary Places or Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. The creators of reference books seek the orderly systematization of knowledge, and their creations bring respectability to everything they touch. Pliny's Naturalis historia, Ptolemy's Geography, William the Conqueror's Domesday Book, and even what may be a map of the stars in the caves of Lascaux were just a few of the first reference books. The Enlightenment saw the first vernacular dictionaries. The 17th-century Le Dictionnaire de l'Academie francois prescribed a word's usage, while Samuel Johnson described the word itself. If a dictionary explains what something is, an encyclopedia explains how it works. Enter Denis Diderot, whose Encyclopedie used entries from the likes of Rousseau and Voltaire, setting the stage for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and eventually Wikipedia. Great stuff for anyone who loves knowledge, deep or trivial. Some readers may even indulge in buying one of the more esoteric titles the author highlights--e.g., The Dictionary of Dainty Breakfasts or Collectible Spoons of the 3rd Reich.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from February 15, 2016
      Throughout history, the role of reference books in the development of civilization has been under-reported and under-valued, according to Lynch, a professor at Rutgers. Without the collection and organization of facts and knowledge into dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, handbooks, anthologies, and other forms of reference, life as we know itwith global languages, major religions, nation-states, codified laws, modern medicine, industry, and commercewould not exist. In 25 main chapters, Lynch entertainingly recounts monumental efforts by overachieving scholars to write and publish 50 influential historical reference titles, including the code of Hammurabi, Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, Diderot's Encyclopedie, the Merck Index, and the Guinness Book of World Records. In 24 half chapters, he introduces related topics, such as dictionary plagiarism, abandoned encyclopedia projects, reference book pleasure reading, and cultural bias in reference books. Especially fun for librarians, You Could Look It Up will entertain and enlighten many scholarly inclined readers and anyone who loves traditional reference works.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

popularity

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"Knowledge is of two kinds," said Samuel Johnson in 1775. "We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." Today we think of Wikipedia as the source of all information, the ultimate reference. Yet it is just the latest in a long line of aggregated knowledge—reference works that have shaped the way we've seen the world for centuries.

You Could Look It Up chronicles the captivating stories behind these great works and their contents, and the way they have influenced each other. From The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known compendium of laws in ancient Babylon almost two millennia before Christ to Pliny's Natural History; from the 11th-century Domesday Book recording land holdings in England to Abraham Ortelius's first atlas of the world; from Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language to The Whole Earth Catalog to Google, Jack Lynch illuminates the human stories and accomplishment behind...

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