Travels in Referenceland: Computing the Almanac Available to Purchase

Anne Grodzins Lipow is a whiz at helping people satisfy needs they never knew they had. Who would have suspected a market for small wooden dreidls (first‐of‐a‐kind in California) when she and a partner began to make and sell these special children's tops a few years ago? Now it is a Berkeley tradition: just step up to Anne's Berkeley street‐stand during the holiday season to buy one of these attractive, inexpensive Chanukah offerings. Not enough time for your library research? Call the University of California at Berkeley Library's Baker service (dial 64‐BAKER) and order campus‐mail delivery of copies of one or more articles or books, located on the Berkeley campus or elsewhere. Lipow began this service for Berkeley faculty and students in 1974, an advance that generated many an “Of course!” from colleagues at the time and scores of “copycat” services since. If you were hunting for a list of female judges in California, you would look in the state almanac, naturally; but a California almanac for adults did not exist until this year. That was when librarian Lipow, having again heard opportunity tapping, joined with political scientist James Fay, and American literature scholar Stephanie Fay, to bring out the inaugural edition of California Almanac (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1984; $12.95).