From the Archives: You Could Look it Up.
As I write this, the deadline for my manuscript is 11 days away. (Eek!) I am deep in revision mode. It’s not a straight line process. I just added 134 words to a chapter from which I need to cut many, many words. Thousands of words. And yet the chapter is better for it. (Though it means I now have to cut an additional 132 words somewhere.) While I revise, here’s a post from 2016 for your amusement. Enjoy!
I am a reference book junkie. I collect reference books the way some people collect Fiesta Ware, Oriental rugs, salt shakers, or black pumps.* I argue that they are useful to me in my career. And sometimes it’s true. (The construction dictionary that I bought more than 25 years ago is proving useful in my current project.) But the immediate needs of my writing career provides no explanation for the itch to acquire, for example, an English to Polish dictionary or an encyclopedia of gods or an historical atlas of Byzantium or–well, you get the idea.
Thanks to author Jack Lynch, I now have a grander explanation for my fascination with reference books.
In You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia, Lynch argues that reference books are “a civilization’s memoranda to itself”.** In looking at a society’s reference books you learn not only the facts contained therein, but something about what that society valued. (Or what some of a society’s members valued: the annotated list of prostitutes from eighteenth century London, for instance, had a specific audience.)
Each chapter pairs two works dealing with similar topics—words, medicine, games, the arts–and places them in historical context. Lynch begins with the ancient law codes that are our oldest reference books and ends with modern books of trivia, which transform the reference book from a compendium of essential knowledge to an amusement for browsers.
The stories of the individual books are fascinating in and of themselves. (The Guinness Book of World Records began as a promotional item designed to settle drunken wagers in pubs.) But some of the most startling revelations come in the form of what Lynch dubs “half-chapters”, short essays in which he investigates broader topics related to reference books, including the antiquity of complaints about information overload, the relative late adoption of alphabetizing as an organizational structure, and the introduction of deliberate errors by reference book editors.
In the end 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.
*By which I mean shoes, not the working end of a well. Though I suspect that someone somewhere collects black pump handles. The collecting passion is idiosyncratic, personal, and occasional inexplicable.
**Now there’s an excuse for reference book acquisition!
From the Archives: Running on Railroad Time
In case you haven’t heard, I am still deep in book mode. May 1 approaches, and I am doing the revision hokey-pokey. (Put the right words in, take the wrong words out, but the right words, and you shake it all about.) While I turn myself around, here is a post for your amusement that originally ran in 2015. (In blog years that’s eons ago.)
I was recently reading an excellent new book on the Battle of Waterloo(1) in which the author made an off-hand comment about the difficulty of synchronizing accounts even when sources give exact times for events because there was no standardized time.
Until the rise of the railroads in the mid-nineteenth century, time was essentially local. With the exception of the few points where public institutions intersected private schedules,(2) most people’s lives were measured by sun time rather than clock time.(3) Clocks became more important with the industrial revolution and the growth of factories; whole communities found their lives regulated by the factory whistle. But even when two places used the same calendar,(4) there was no way to synchronize their clock towers. More importantly, there was no reason to. The factory in No Place In Particular had no need to match its schedule to the factory in The Town Over The Hill.
That all changed with the railroads.
Railroads were born in Britain in 1825, using technologies developed in the British mining industry. The first public railway, the Stockton and Darlington, carried six hundred passengers over a twenty-six mile line in only four hours on its first trip. Over the next twenty years, investors formed more than six hundred rail companies that together laid more than ten thousand miles of track in Britain–transforming train travel from a novelty to a necessity. As rail travel became more common, differences in local time (sometimes as much as twenty minutes!) became a problem. In 1840, the Great Western Railroad instituted “railway time”. Other railroads soon followed. Some towns resisted bringing their public clocks into line with the railroad,(5) but by 1880 all of Great Britain was using the same time standard, assuming everyone remembered to wind their watches.
The problems were bigger in the United States, where the distances involved and the potential time variations were greater and rugged individualism was the national pastime. By 1840, America had more miles of track than Great Britain. By 1860, it had more railroad track than the rest of the world combined–and was laying more. For the first time it was important for someone in Pittsburgh to know the exact time in Poughkeepsie, Peoria, and Pacific City. If local time differed too much from place to place, people missed trains, trains missed switches, produce rotted. At first, time was regulated on a railroad by railroad basis. Busy stations had to have a different clock for each railroad. It was confusing, It was messy. And it was dangerous.
In 1883, North American railroad officers finally adopted a plan for Standard Time, creating four zones in the United States and one in eastern Canada, based on mean sun times at set meridians from Greenwich, England. (Western Canada was apparently left to fend for itself in terms of time.) Despite some local opposition–the Indianapolis Sentinel complained that people would have to “eat,sleep, work…and marry by railroad time”(see 5 below)– Standard Time became the norm. The Standard Time Act of 1918 belatedly sanctioned existing practice. (I must admit, I wonder what problem required its passage. Was there a town somewhere that simply refused to reset its clocks?)
“Making the trains run on time” remains a synonym for efficiency, Amtrak not withstanding.
(1)David Crane’s Went The Day Well?, one of a flood of new books on the subject because the bicentennial of the battle is nigh.
(2)Think the start of a Christian church service or the Muslim call to prayer. Both of which were publicly and loudly announced in the pre-modern world–church steeples and minarets served much the same function.
(3)At some gut level, we still run on sun time. Who doesn’t remember feeling outraged at the unfairness of being sent to bed while it was still light out on a summer evening? And don’t get me started on Daylight Savings Time.
(4) Not a given, as we’ve discussed before.
(5) Someone is always ready to fight for the status quo, even if it means missing the train.
Image courtesy of ingfbruno, via Wikamedia Commons
From the Archives: Madame Lenormand’s Fortune Telling Cards
I am still deep in book mode, with a May 1 deadline bearing down on me–I feel a bit like the heroine in a melodrama who is tied to the tracks and knows the train is coming through the tunnel ANY MINUTE NOW. (Don’t worry. I’m not waiting to be saved, though My Own True Love is making life easier anyway he can.) While I get myself off the tracks, here is a post for your amusement that originally ran in 2018. (Which seems like decades ago.)
* * *
Back in February I spoke at the Civil War Museum at Kenosha, Wisconsin, as part of their annual Civil War medicine weekend. I was a featured speaker, but the heart of the weekend was the 17th Corps Field Hospital–a Civil War reenactment unit from the Midwest that “heals the sick and treats the wounded ‘Under the Yellow Flag'” at events across the country from February through October. Like the best re-enactors, they are accurate and passionate. They are also skilled performers. I urge you to attend one of their events if you get the chance.
As I wandered through the re-enactors’ displays, I passed a woman seating at a small table in the corner. She was dressed in period appropriate-clothing, but her dress was more elaborate than any nurse would have worn and she had no exhibits laid out. “Read your cards?” she asked as I went by.
I needed to distract myself from the inevitable pre-speech jitters,* so I sat down, prepared to be intrigued by tarot cards yet again. To my surprise, I was treated to a history lesson along with my card reading. Instead of using tarot cards, the reader used Lenormand cards, named after Madame Lenormand, a famous nineteenth century French fortune teller. (Some sources claim that Lenormand adapted the deck from a pre-existing parlor game, the “Game of Hope”.)
We don’t know much about Lenormand’s early life–her biographies are inconsistent and have the whiff of mythology. She is generally believed to come from Normandy–le normand. What we do know is that Marie Anne Adelaide Lenormand (1772-1843) rose to fame during the Napoleonic era, reading the cards of notable figures who passed through Paris. According to one account, she once read Napoleon’s cards. Instead of telling him what he wanted to hear, she informed him that according to the cards he would ultimately be unsuccessful in his military conquests–a piece of fortune-telling integrity that landed her in jail for a time.
Lenormand successfully plied her trade in Paris for forty years, making enough good predictions for influential people to earn both a reputation and a small fortune.
As far as my reading went, that’s between me, the card reader and the cards.
*Those jitters are crucial. They seem to be tied to the energy that makes the speech come alive. But they aren’t comfortable.