I have discussed elsewhere the curious topic of gigantism in the child development literature (Guha, 2017), an interest which arose from having been asked to review the seventh edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science (Lerner, 2015) for Reference Reviews (RR 2016/037) and, more or less simultaneously, being asked to review the sixth edition of Rutter’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Thapar et al., 2015) for the Journal of Mental Health (Guha, 2016).
My whole professional life seems to have revolved around those two books. When I started in Camden public libraries, which at that time housed the Metropolitan Psychology Collection, the Handbook was a standard text for the students who regularly dropped in. The first edition, edited by Carl Murchison in 1931, was a compact volume of about 700 pages with a genuinely international range of contributors, including, most notably, Piaget, Anna Freud, Margaret Mead and Kurt Lewin. By the time I became social sciences librarian at North East London Polytechnic in 1971, it was rather oddly known as “Mussen’s Carmichael” after its current and previous editors and had expanded into two volumes, which were in regular request by a wide range of students – trainee teachers, midwives, social workers, etc. The latest edition is obviously aimed at advanced psychology students and is in four massive volumes, each one weighing more than 5 pounds on my kitchen scales. Murchison’s first edition weighed not much over 2 pounds in its entirety (according to the scales in the British Library post-room – a request which puzzled the staff there somewhat), a nearly 10-fold increase.
When I became librarian of the Institute of Psychiatry in 1981, the handbook had been joined on the reference shelves by Rutter’s Child Psychiatry. The first edition of that was a comfortable handful, a bit over 3 pounds in weight (as measured in the British Library post-room), just over 9 inches high, with 960 pages of well spaced-out, wide-margined text. The new edition needs both hands to lift, stands 11.5 inches high and is more than twice the weight in spite of using thinner paper, with well over a thousand pages of text set out in two densely packed columns.
With this huge expansion has come, unfortunately, a loss of readability. I spent a couple of pleasant afternoons in the British Library reading the first editions of those two books. I could comfortably hold them and could read either of them in one session from beginning to end and come away feeling that I had taken in what was known about child development and mental health at the time of their publication. I doubt that anyone except the indefatigable Professor Rutter (I have never met a workaholic to match him) has read the whole of his latest edition, and nobody could possibly read the new edition of the handbook. Students can no longer use them to get an overview of the entire subject. Student knowledge must inevitably be bitty now.
This same sort of expansion has affected the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development. When I reviewed the first edition (RR 2006/64), it was a sturdy but portable volume of just over 600 pages. By my estimate, this new edition contains roughly twice as many words and is twice as heavy. Has our knowledge of child development doubled in the past 12 years?
Obviously, there have been considerable changes – quite enough to justify a new edition. This book mentions a “neuroscientific frame of reference as a consequence of an expanding suite of sophisticated brain imaging and genome-mapping techniques […] New insights into a range of developmental disorders […] advances in evolutionary biology […] statistical analyses suitable for longitudinal research”, etc. The foreword admits that “The sheer volume of information now available to students and scholars of child development is overwhelming”. This book probably does as good a job as can be done of summarising all this information. Even so, it is too bulky to handle comfortably, and I very much doubt whether anyone is going to read all of it. It is still loosely tethered to the practicalities of student attention spans by the need to print it as a hardback book. I assume that future editions will be electronic only, with no limitations on size, while there is some evidence to suggest that average attention spans are decreasing.
This is not, in my terms, an encyclopaedia. It is a handbook of 124 lengthy signed essays, arranged in 11 broad subject areas rather than in alphabetical order. As far as I can tell from a cursory examination, none of the entries have been carried over or amended from the first edition. This is a completely new work with, dare I say it, slightly less well-known contributors – I remember names like Simon Baron-Cohen, Peter Fonagy, Eric Taylor, Judy Dunn and Robert Sternberg from the first edition. The foreword suggests that this “should serve as an invaluable resource for beginning students”. I recommended the first edition for that purpose, but I am less certain about this one. It seems to me that students would need a certain amount of background knowledge to be able to cope with some of the entries here – I cannot imagine, say, a first-year nursing student, trainee teacher or even psychology undergraduate plunging straight into it. Libraries catering for such students might do better by steering them towards recent books, such as Child Development (Crowley, 2017) or Child Development for Early Years Students & Practitioners (Neaum, 2016), to give them more of an overview of the subject. I can more easily see this as an invaluable resource for more advanced students and scholars who wish to find summaries of aspects of the subject tangential to their own research fields.
