General Reference Works

In "The Library of Babel" (1942) the Argentinian author—and librarian— Jorge Luis Borges describes an infinite library, its books containing every possible combination of the letters of the alphabet in every possible order. Somewhere in this library, it is believed, lie repositories of essential truths; somewhere too are the contradictions of these truths. Further, given the infinite possible combinations of letters and words and pages, "on some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god." Borges's intellectual and mathematical and even religious fantasy may have its much too complete realization in the Internet, a vast library of information, data, truth, and untruth. Yet that almost infinite abundance of stuff does not produce coherence, which remains the particular function of the individuated book. And the special role of the reference work in producing coherence is to organize information around a topic, to put together the disparate pieces to enable the user to recognize relevance and relationship.

Two of this year's titles are impressively successful at organizing and clarifying their topics. The first is the four-volume The Early Republic and Antebellum America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History, ed. Christopher G. Bates (Sharpe). The heart of Bates's project, taking up roughly 1,100 of its 1,500 total pages, is the set of alphabetically arranged, individually signed entries, each further supported by cross-references to other entries and by brief lists of further reading. Access to these entries is enhanced by an introductory "Topic Finder" list—it includes "Arts, Literature, and Culture" and "Biographies"—and by a comprehensive 120-page index. General entries in the literature category include "Literature," "Newspapers and Periodicals," "Poetry" (though not fiction or the essay), and "Transcendentalism." Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and others of their stature also receive entries. This essential information is further supplemented by a section reproducing excerpts from major texts—for example, several paragraphs from Emerson's "The American Scholar" and from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—and by ten topical chronologies, among them "Art, Literature, and Culture." There is also a 20-page bibliography, "a selective list of books and Web sites that cover broad aspects of the early republic and antebellum America"; unfortunately, it is only a list, not categorized or annotated. Oh, and a glossary of historically relevant terms, like ambrotype and yeoman. In sum, this is a significant effort to fully address the terms in the title, and a historically inclined enthusiast could dive deep and long into these pages.

The second major reference contribution is The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, ed. Joel Myerson et al., so thorough in its coverage of the topic—and so cumbersome at 750 pages of thick paper—that handbook hardly seems the appropriate term. Fifty contributed essays from acknowledged experts at their aspect of the topic are organized into six sections, the sections themselves arrayed in a roughly chronological order reflecting the development of the idea, its cultural manifestations, and its influences: "Transcendental Contexts," including Frank Shuffelton's "Puritanism" (pp. 38-49) and Barbara L. Packer's "Romanticism" (pp. 84-101); "Transcendentalism as a Social Movement," including Albert J. von Frank's "Religion" (pp. 117-35), Sandra Harbert Petrulionis's "Antislavery Reform" (pp. 210-21), and Sterling F. Delano's "Transcendentalism Communities" (pp. 249-59); "Transcendentalism as a Literary Movement," including Ed Folsom's "Transcendental Poetics: Emerson, Higginson, and the Rise of Whitman and Dickinson" (pp. 263-90) and Kent P. Ljungquist's "Lectures and the Lyceum Movement" (pp. 330-47); "Transcendentalism and the Other Arts," covering the visual arts, photography, architecture, and music; "Varieties of Transcendental Experience," among them Ronald A. Bosco's "Concord" (pp. 477-94), Laura Dassow Walls's "Science and Technology" (pp. 572-82), and Richard Kopley's "Naysayers: Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville" (pp. 597-613); and "Transcendental Afterlives," most notably David M. Robinson's "The Free Religion Movement" (pp. 617-28...