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  • General Reference Works
  • Gary Scharnhorst

For several years now I’ve been predicting the demise of the reference book. I should have predicted instead the steady decline in overall sales of reference books and a corresponding increase in their prices. To be sure, fewer of them are published these days than in the dim past before the Internet; more to the point, precious few of those that are published sell more than 300 copies during their first year in print. To judge from OCLC statistics, many sell fewer than 100 hard copies to libraries worldwide. Some are issued in both print and online versions, however, which is apparently the marketing model of the future (not that the online edition is always cheaper). Woe unto anyone without a computer, an up-to-date operating system, and unrestricted access to a research library website with links to databases aplenty.

Perhaps the most obvious examples of overpriced reference books in literary studies published in 2011 are the dozen volumes (numbered 302 through 313) in the Contemporary Authors series, each of them subtitled A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields (Gale). Each volume retails for over $300, and the series as a whole has been rendered obsolete by the Internet. I can’t think of a single reason even a library with an unlimited acquisitions budget should buy them.

Nearly as trivial are the six crib sheets for underachieving secondary school or undergraduate students released this year and entitled either Short Stories for Students or Novels for Students or Poetry for Students [End Page 463] and subtitled Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories or Novels or Poetry (Gale). Each of these volumes retails for a whopping $130, and again I can’t think of a single reason for an acquisitions librarian to purchase any of them. If necessary, cancel your standing order.

Then there are three volumes by Adam Augustyn, each in the 240-page range—American Literature from 1600 through the 1850s, American Literature from the 1850s to 1945, and American Literature from 1945 through Today—issued by Britannica Educational Publishing in association with Rosen Educational Services and available in print, e-book, and “mixed media” versions. According to the Britannica Blog, Mr. Augustyn is an assistant editor and assistant manager at Britannica and holds an M.A. in English. Magisterial his literary history isn’t. It pays short shrift to women and minority writers (Harriet Beecher Stowe is only mentioned twice in passing; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles W. Chesnutt not at all), its organization is chaotic (Upton Sinclair is followed by Sidney Lanier), its style simplistic (“Captain Ahab pursues the white whale, Moby Dick, which finally kills him”), and its “facts” sometimes wrong (“Dickinson wrote little about the American Civil War”). Caveat emptor.

I am also at a loss to identify the target audience for Christopher MacGowan’s The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook (Wiley). Certainly this boondoggle contains nothing new, not even an innovative format. Overpriced at $94.95, the volume seems to epitomize what is wrong with the reference book market—an expensive purchase with no discernible raison d’être except library sales. Best known for his work in modern American poetry, MacGowan includes a few introductory historical essays followed by brief biographical sketches of 31 “major writers,” synopses of 31 “key texts,” and concluding thematic chapters on race, gender, and film—as well as an occasional factual error, such as this statement: “The first major step toward eradicating slavery occurred when Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia in 1862.” He somehow succeeds in ignoring the fact that slavery had been outlawed north of the Mason-Dixon Line and in the British West Indies decades earlier. The analysis is also marred by a few urban legends, such as that the critical response to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening “effectively ended her writing career.”

Nor, in my opinion, does the three-volume, 1200-plus-page Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature, ed. Jennifer McClinton-Temple (Facts on [End Page 464] File), merit a recommendation. The contributors press exactly 50...

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