Cuneiform to Computer: A History of Reference Sources

There are, of course, many books about reference sources, their use and nature. Many of them, indeed, have been written by our profilic author himself. But books on the history of reference books are a rarity. Histories of language, learning and scholarship, even libraries, are plentiful, and a few famous titles, it is true, have generated their own bibliography: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Roget′s Thesaurus, and Sam Johnson′s Dictionary are three, but I know of no such book as this: a history of reference sources in general.

I must confess that at first I groaned on seeing yet another work by Katz,...