The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences

When looking at the Oxford Companion to Consciousness (Bayne et al., 2009) for Reference Reviews recently (RR 2010/205), I expressed my disagreement with Oxford University Press's policy of calling this series of excellent compact encyclopaedias “companions” when they are not at all companionable. Possibly because, like most reference librarians, I have spent so much of my life guiding beginners around the literature in subjects where my own knowledge is fairly limited, I like books to start off by explaining what they are about. The golden rule of teaching seems to me to apply to companionable books:...