The first dictionary of the English language, by Samuel Johnson, was published in 1755. It didn’t pass muster with London booksellers, who paid Johnson 1,500 guineas – the 2013 equivalent of $327,000 (or 210,000 pounds) – to improve it. The effort took Johnson nine years, and historians describe his achievement as a turning point in modern history.
The next two centuries marked a golden age for reference books. In the 1970s, men made their living traipsing across America door-to-door, selling encyclopedias considered such pricey intellectual investments that many middle-class households paid for them in monthly installments.
Yet last weekend in downtown Durango’s Southwest Book Trader, the 2004 Merriam-Webster Dictionary was selling for $2.
Yes, computers and the Internet have all but killed the once-revered reference book, at least in its physical form.
Of course, the knowledge in these books lies out there somewhere, but generally it’s on CDs and not on bookshelves.
Ah, what a loss.
Consider: If you perused the revised fourth edition of Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations, you could learn invaluable sayings such as Crazy Horse’s admonishing wisdom that “one does not sell the earth upon which people walk,” or that in 1925, Dorothy Parker suggested her own epitaph be “Excuse my dust.”
Dictionaries of quotations, even 20 years ago, might fetch a price of more than $100. But at Southwest Book Trader, a used bookstore at 175 E. Fifth St., owner George Hassan was selling it for $8.
Just a few blocks away, at The Bookcase at East Second Avenue and College Drive, Webster’s New World Dictionary, the third edition – a formidably thick hardback copy – was selling for $4.
There are some diehards. For instance, The Bookcase’s owner, Ann Perkins-Parrott, still prefers using her multivolume dictionary to look up words, saying she loves their rich exploration of “archaic language.”
She recalled that, growing up, her father, an attorney, stocked her Texas home with three sets of encyclopedias – each necessary because they promised access to different canons of knowledge with differing levels of sophistication.
She said today’s market for such books is nearly dead.
“Occasionally, you can sell something like that to a home-schooling family because they don’t want their children to be exposed to any new knowledge,” she said. “But generally, you can’t sell things like encyclopedias – nobody buys them, and charities won’t even take them as donations.”
Jeanne Costello, bookseller at Maria’s Bookshop on Main Avenue, racked her memory, and finally said she’d seen one hardback encyclopedia sold in the last few years, “and that was a special order.”
Swift end
Just 20 years ago, the truism was that every American family had their “Bible and their dictionary.”
Sales of Encyclopaedia Britannica, the oldest continuously published English-language encyclopedia, peaked in 1990, selling 120,000 copies that year.
As of 2010, it has ceased print, with luxury Britannicas discounted from their former $1,395 asking price.
Indeed, the demise of the household reference book is so nearly complete that children will have to Google extensively to discover that hardback dictionaries, almanacs, atlases, thesauruses and encyclopedias once settled all manner of kitchen-table arguments, from how to spell “environment,” to what year India declared its independence, to the lineage of the Austrian monarchy.
Durango’s professional bibliophiles agree that the Internet killed the reference book.
Today’s elementary-school students turn to Wikipedia for their book reports, and college students use online dictionaries rather than ferreting out a word’s meaning from musty editions of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Andy White, director of Durango Public Library, said the library had halved the number of books in its reference section, with reference books accounting for just 350 volumes in its total collection of 109,000 items.
He said the library subscribes to several verified reference book services online, but said the indiscriminating use of the Internet in place of a reference book is ill-advised.
He said while the Internet purports to hold truth on any number of subjects, the great preponderance of websites contain misinformation.
“People hang their hat on Wikipedia, but Wikipedia can be hacked, misinformation put on there. I think (TV political satirist) Stephen Colbert does that once a month,” he said.
Indeed, Wikipedia, the premier source of all knowledge in the Internet age, frequently pronounces living celebrities and politicians dead before their time, and once managed to describe David Beckham, the English soccer superstar who married a Spice Girl and moonlights as a Calvin Klein underwear model, as “a Chinese goalkeeper in the 18th century.”
White said the Internet can’t compete with the romance of reference books, when you open the book to a page and elope with entries you find along the way, getting immersed in words, historical figures and countries one doesn’t recognize.
“There’s not a lot of serendipitous learning” on the Internet, he said.
100 percent accurate 12 percent of the time
There still are many areas in life where the “mostly right” standard of truth that dominates the Internet won’t cut it.
Maria’s Costello said specialized reference books still have purchase within professional or academic fields.
“In psychology, you want the DSM-5 (Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition) in the current hardcover, and nurses want pharmacological guidebooks,” she said. “To my knowledge, that hasn’t been replaced by online.
“The truth is there’s plenty of people who don’t want ‘good enough’ – they want the best available, the best possible, as opposed to ‘that will do.’ It’s a good thing to have that person out there who has that rarified specialized knowledge,” she said.
Hassan, owner of Southwest Book Trader, was less hopeful. He said he rarely uses the computer.
“I socially network with everyone who walks into the store. I don’t need a device to do that. Eventually, you know, people will rely entirely on them. They can’t walk down the street now without staring at a screen. Why would they need a book?”
He said if people want facts verified by scholars, experts and publishers, they still have to turn to a book.
“They’re welcome to come in,” he said.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
This story has been corrected since its original publication to fix the spelling of Ann Perkins-Parrott’s name.
