 |
In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson tagged the lexicographer as "a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge." In our look at dictionaries and single-volume encyclopedias, however, Dr. Johnson's description of his own profession (with tongue at least somewhat in cheek) d sn't mirror those who fulfill today's exacting demand -- from individuals, schools, libraries and more -- for words presented with currency and accuracy. Michael Agnes, editor-in-chief of the fourth edition of Webster's New World College Dictionary (IDG Books), tells PW, "Producing dictionaries is very, very hard work. It's not for amateurs. When the purchaser pulls a dictionary off the shelf, he or she thinks it will be 100% error-free, and if you don't approach a dictionary in that way, knowing that this expectation is there, you'll surely founder."
Also to meet the purchaser's requirements, most publishers rigorously update their dictionaries, an activity that has acquired greater significance of late. For example, the cover of the latest Random House Webster's College Dictionary proclaims, "Updated Annually." (Not surprisingly, the Y2K fever has reached this publishing arena: the Random House title states, "New Words for the New Millennium," while the cover of IDG's dictionary, mentioned above, declares, "Defining the English Language for the 21st Century.") Merriam-Webster president and publisher John Morse explains, "Not too long ago, we'd be adding maybe a few dozen words to our Collegiate Dictionary every year. Today it can be more than 100 in a given year. One of today's trends is that words establish themselves in the language much more quickly, especially with the growth of the Internet and progress in health and medicine, scientific research and education. It's an unsung task, silently keeping the books up to date, but that's what people expect."
After a decade or so, annually wedging new entries into an existing collection of words and definitions isn't enough. Thus, the overhauled third edition of Houghton Mifflin's The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1992. Merriam-Webster issued the all-new 10th edition of its Collegiate two years ago, just as IDG released the fourth edition of its Webster's New World College Dictionary this past summer. "Any dictionary underg s a revision when linguistic changes can no longer be done by patching pages," notes Michael Agnes. "The time comes when you have to rethink the book from A to Z. For the fourth, we added a couple of signatures to handle new entries, words with a life of three years, so they're not merely ephemeral. He adds, "What we do in a dictionary is record actual word usage. One example is the word minuscule, which we also find spelled miniscule everywhere. We once called that erroneous, but now our entry for miniscule is labeled a 'disputed variant' of minuscule. If you think some language use is a crime, then we're crime reporters."
Crime scenes pull crowds, but to attract attention, John Morse's company turned not to crime but to humor with its recent publication of The Merriam-Webster and Garfield Dictionary, a paperback sprinkled with comic strips by Jim Davis, creator of that sassy feline Garfield. As is more and more the case in what is an urgently competitive field, the move toward making dictionaries and single-volume encyclopedias more accessible, more inviting, more popular with individual users -- yet without sacrificing the imprimatur of authority -- is growing ever more evident. "We've always wanted to find new ways to draw people into dictionaries," says Morse, who met with Jim Davis at the 1998 BEA, where the idea was born. "The character uses just the right kind of words to incorporate into a dictionary, and in addition, Jim has always been passionate about literacy efforts."
Literacy assistance for language learners is also enhanced by such established titles as Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Basic English, Random House Webster's Basic Dictionary of American English and Webster's New World Basic Dictionary of American English (IDG). Last month, Cambridge University Press released the Cambridge Dictionary of American English in a trade paper edition and in a paper/CD-ROM package. According to Paul Heacock, the dictionary's managing editor, "One of the big trends is the production of dictionaries designed for people learning English as a second language or as a foreign language. Virtually every dictionary publisher in the U.S. has one or is coming out with one. It's a fairly new market because of the huge number of people now learning English, which has become the world's lingua franca. The market for American English is worldwide because we export so much of what passes for culture these days with our movies and television, our MTV and our McDonald's."
This dictionary is an outgrowth of the Cambridge International Dictionary of English, published in 1994, which in turn is based on an electronic corpus of 100 million words found in long strings of running text, such as a year of the Washington Post, entire books, even whole hours of Tom Snyder on late-night TV. "The words selected for the American English dictionary are based on frequency of use and meaning," says Heacock. "There's a trend toward computational analysis with corpus-based dictionaries." An adjunct work, the Cambridge Dictionary of American English: Student Activity Book, which is due this month, is intended to "get across the idea of dictionary skills," he adds. "We're planning more books for the ESL [English as a second language] and EFL [English as a foreign language] markets." CUP has not, of course, abandoned its primary focus on more scholarly books, which include (among other upcoming titles) A Dictionary of Literary Symbols by Michael Ferber and A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580“1642 by Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson (both Dec.).
At NTC/Contemporary in Chicago, Richard Spears, editorial director of dictionaries and reference, notes that the company "has been publishing learner's dictionaries since the early '80s." Coming in April is NTC's Compact English Dictionary: The Core Vocabulary for Learners, a paper abridgment of NTC's American English Learner's Dictionary, published last year. "That's one new direction for dictionaries -- simplicity and ease of use," Spears continues. "Less is more. ESL and EFL dictionaries will continue to be the core of our reference program here, and in a year, we expect to publish major dictionaries of phraseology, idioms and verbal combinations that you can't define literally." In January NTC will release a combination of seven of its CD-ROM dictionaries -- including NTC's American Idioms Dictionary and NTC's Dictionary of Acronyms and Abbreviations -- on a single CD-ROM entitled NTC's EFL Bookshelf. (A dictionary aimed at a rather sophisticated audience is due from Contemporary in February: The Cynic's Dictionary by Aubrey Dillon-Malone, who collects quotes from Ambrose Bierce, W.C. Fields and others possessed of cutting attitudes.)
Worlds of Words
In an interesting twist, St. Martin's has just published a dictionary that introduces many unfamiliar words in English as they are spoken outside our country. With so many publishers in the dictionary game, SMP wanted a piece of the action, too, and the inclusion of unusual lingo is one of its sales hooks. "The Encarta World English Dictionary is the first dictionary we've published. It begins an especially big program because we'll follow this with a college dictionary and a thesaurus," says Garrett Keily, president and publisher of SMP Scholarly and Reference Publishing. Emphasizing Encarta's domestic applicability, Keily continues, "This is an American English dictionary that opens a window on how English is used in other parts of the world." Examples include tickety-boo (perfectly fine) from the U.K. and totsiens (a friendly farewell) from South Africa.
The book originated when Nigel Newton of Bloomsbury Publishing in the U.K. took the idea to Microsoft's Bill Gates, who wanted to expand the brand name of his electronic Encarta encyclopedia. Bloomsbury subsequently approached SMP to partner on the project. As a result, SMP acquired North American print rights, and Microsoft released the dictionary on CD-ROM. "We'll do a Dictionary of Quotations in 2000 and a college dictionary in 2001," says Keily. "Eventually we'll have dictionaries in mass market as well. Working with the database, we can spin off many other dictionaries." To help sell Encarta, SMP sent Anne Soukhanov, the U.S. general editor, on an ambitious tour; she was also a primary guest last month on a segment of Book TV on C-Span2 entitled "Dictionaries: Old and New."
More Than Words Can Say
 |
Moving beyond dictionaries designed to define the English language, a multidisciplinary range of dictionaries is enlarging to address almost any subject that can be isolated. In September, Houghton Mifflin published Abbreviations Dictionary by Robert S. Wachal. The same month, Penguin released a revised second edition of The Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics, edited by David Nelson, and a third edition of The Penguin Dictionary of Electronics, edited by Valerie Illingworth. "We have about 40 of these in our Penguin Reference series," reports Marcia Burch, Penguin's director of marketing. "They're meant for a scholarly audience, although not exclusively. The mathematics and electronics dictionaries can be used by anyone working in the field. We're actually trying to do more books with nonacademic potential. The Penguin Shakespeare Dictionary is a particularly good fit for us because of our commitment to the Pelican Shakespeares, which we're in the midst of revising." An original paperback, the Shakespeare reference will be a January release edited by Sandra Clark.
Dictionaries are a vital component of the list at Barron's, according to managing editor and director of acquisitions Grace Freedson, and include such titles as Dictionary of Marketing Terms and ...Business Terms. "A number of them are being revised for next year," Freedson tells PW, "and next spring, we'll publish a new Dictionary of Aquarium Terms and Complete Gardener's Dictionary." Last month, Barron's released The Encyclopedia of Roses by Robert Markley, which covers the many variety of roses, tells how to propagate them and even how to cultivate them as a business. "We're publishing more dictionaries that reflect the strength of our various niches," Freedson notes, "such as our pet books and our gardening books."
"We're doing more reference books like The Penguin Dictionary of Plant Sciences [edited by Jill Bailey, Feb. 2000] and the Dictionary of Word Origins [by John Ayto, Feb. 2000] because of the new U.K. publishers we've taken on for distribution," says Paul Feldstein, marketing director at Trafalgar Square. The former is published by Penguin U.K., the latter by Bloomsbury U.K. Last month, Macmillan U.K. published The Royal Horticultural Society Shorter Dictionary of Gardening by Michael Pollock and Mark Griffiths. "There's no particular subject niche for us," Feldstein notes. "We've always had reference books with a British focus, but these are more international in scope."
Adopting an American Accent
Formerly more British in scope, DK Publishing in this country is making itself more at home on this side of the pond. "Dorling Kindersley has been around for 25 years and has had an office in the U.S. for 10," says DK's editorial director in New York, LaVonne Carlson. "Most of that time we've been Americanizing books that originated in the U.K., but I came on in January, and now we've started an origination program here. We've got a couple of books on this fall's list, and there'll be 22 on the spring's. In the next year, a third of the list will be U.S.-originated." DK, of course, is noted for its visual approach to reference works, such as the DK Illustrated Oxford Dictionary (published in 1998 and to be released in a newly revised edition next July) and the DK Ultimate Visual Dictionary 2000, which was updated this year with a 48-page signature of additional color spreads on such hot topics as the World Wide Web and El Niño and La Niña.
"The visual dictionaries represent a highly developed approach to making books accessible to visual thinkers as easily as verbal thinkers," says Carlson, citing next spring's Visual Dictionary of the Civil War (Mar. 2000) as emblematic of both DK's swing toward American topics and its further development of illustration-based reference works. "Building our presence in the American market, we're creating affiliations with major sports leagues and with VH1, whose name is on our new Rock Stars Encyclopedia [an October revised edition by Dafydd Rees and Luke Crampton]." Even Hollywood U.S.A. made a dramatic entrance in the publisher's Star Wars Episode I: The Visual Dictionary (May) by David West Reynolds. Carlson notes that many of DK's books are suitable for both adults and children, citing as an example September's DK Space Encyclopedia by Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest (the title is packaged with a CD-ROM). "The underlying philosophy here is education," Carlson continues. "That's the aim for all of our books. The ideal we see would be for a parent and child to sit down and participate in a book together."
Taking the children's sector a step further, K.S. Giniger, in association with Continuum, will publish The Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, edited by Bernice E. Cullinan and Diane Person, next spring, an exploration of the writing, illustrating and publishing of children's books in the English-speaking world.
Encyclopedic in Scope
Like DK, capitalizing on very American interests, HarperResource is the source for Total Football II: The Official Encyclopedia of the National Football League, edited by Bob Carroll et al. (Sept.). University of Missouri Press just published Dictionary of Missouri Biography, edited by Lawrence O. Christensen et al., and Texas A&M University Press released Dictionary of Texas Artists, 1800“1945 by Paula L. Grauer and Michael R. Grauer (Sept.). From just north of the U.S. border, in June University of Toronto Press issued Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples, edited by Paul Robert Magocsi, which depicts all of the 119 diverse groups that make up that country's population.
An instructional series of encyclopedias without geographical demarcations has taken root at Running Press, which now has some 20 books in its The Encyclopedia of... line centering on craft and hobby subjects. Released last month was The Encyclopedia of Candle-Making Techniques by Sandie Lea, and next spring will bring The Encyclopedia of Photography by Adrian Davies. "We started these in 1990 with The Encyclopedia of Watercolor Techniques [by Diana Craig and Hazel Harrison]," says Running Press publisher Buz Teacher. "That has been our most successful title, selling well over 100,000 copies, and it's now in a second edition. We thought we'd do watercolors, oils and pastels and then run out of subjects, but more kept coming up. Now it's an open-ended series. Some of the more unusual subjects have even been among the biggest selling, such as The Encyclopedia of Jewelry-Making Techniques." The series reflects trends in the handicrafts fields, according to Teacher. "It can take up to two years to create a book, so we have to predict what's going to become big. My gift trade director came in and asked if we realized how popular candles are. Making use of that information, we came up with the candle-making book." Running Press also has a small trade paperback Cyclopedia line, whose next entry will be spring's Cyclopedia of Dreams.
E Pluribus Unum
A time-honored way of building sales from existing properties is to cull material from multivolume sets and present it in a single book. Routledge is doing just that with its Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy set for next March. "This will have more than 2000 entries cross-referenced and indexed just as entries are in the original 10-volume set," notes Amy Lee, product manager. At a $40 cover price as opposed to $2995 for the unabridged work, it should appeal to a lot more people.
Exhibiting its broad range of informational approaches, Oxford University Press titles are as diverse as last month's The Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide and next January's The Cutting Edge: An Encyclopedia of Advanced Technologies, which Robert Oppedisano, OUP's director of marketing and sales for scholarly and professional reference, describes as "an A to Z guide to 100 of the most important innovations, from cell phones to genetic engineering." Representing an escalation toward more obviously voguish subjects by even this house are the new second edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine, edited by Jancis Robinson, and The Oxford Companion to Food, edited by Alan Davidson, both due out this month. "We've covered all the classic core areas over the years with books such as The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization and ...World War II," says Steve Maikowski, marketing director for adult trade reference. "While The Oxford Companion to Archaeology is a very distinguished book, it looks too scholarly for some buyers, such as those at chain stores. They're starting to take fewer copies, so we're expanding not only into more popular areas but changing formats by including things like color plates. We'll be doing The Oxford Companion to Gardens and The Oxford Companion to Cars."
Even so, initial orders for The Oxford Companion to Food were below what Maikowski had expected, perhaps because line drawings took the place of color, a decision intended to hold the price at $60. It wasn't until this October title was deemed an instant classic and a must-have for foodies in publications such as Gourmet and Library Journal that orders took off, doubling in just two weeks.
 |
Pop culture is inescapably in the forefront at Checkmark Books, the two-year-old imprint of Facts on File. "We do 25 trade titles a season, and 10“15 of those are dictionaries or single-volume encyclopedias," editorial director Laurie Likoff tells PW. "We adapt Facts on File books or we buy reprint rights from other publishers or we develop our own original material." Among the reprints and revised editions set for spring 2000 are The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson; Encyclopedia of Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Cyclones by David Longshore; and The Encyclopedia of Alien Encounters by Alan Baker. Likoff also remarks that she is developing a niche of crime and criminology books, such as next spring's updated edition of Cops, Crooks, and Criminologists: An International Biographical Dictionary of Law Enforcement by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod and The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Michael Newton, the latter of which will be published simultaneously in paper with a Facts on File hardcover. "As you can see, it's a very eclectic program that also includes military history, entertainment and health," she says. "We look for defined segments of interest and give home consumers just as much information as they need without giving them too much."
"The market is more sophisticated than it used to be," notes Lionel Koffler, president of Firefly Books Ltd., which has a pair of new titles charting aspects of the natural world: last month's The Encyclopedia of Sharks by Steve and Jane Parker and Encyclopedia of North American Trees by Sam Benvie (Mar. 2000). "Plain old picture books are a hard sell, but books with authoritative information on animal behavior are selling better than ever," says Koffler. Both fish and human behavior stir the waters with more than 2000 entries, 422 illustrations of fish, 470 photos and 718 line drawings in Ken Schultz's Fishing Encyclopedia: Worldwide Angling Guide (IDG, Oct.). A dryer variety of sport rolled in with October's The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards by Michael Ian Shamos (Lyons Press).
Reference Gets Religion
An unavoidably dominant fascination that has captured an enormous chunk of the American public in recent seasons is religion and spirituality, and reference publishers are making certain not to miss the boat. These are just a sampling: Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of World Religions (Sept.), DK Illustrated Dictionary of Religions by Philip Wilkinson (Nov.), The HarperCollins Concise Guide to World Religions by Mircea Eliade and Ioan P. Couliano (Harper San Francisco, Jan. 2000) and Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament, edited by Carol Meyers (Houghton Mifflin, Jan. 2000). Thomas Nelson prides itself on its religion reference titles and this month published I Never Knew That Was in the Bible!: The Ultimate A to Z Resource, edited by Martin Hugh Manser. (Nelson's Pocket Reference Bible Dictionary, with more than 1500 entries, was released in June.). "For so long, reference materials were aimed strictly at the scholars, pastors, college professors and the like," explains Phil Stoner, publisher for Thomas Nelson's reference and electronic division, "but we've added books that appeal to the general reader, Sunday school teachers or new Christians who just want to learn more about the Bible."
Beliefs of a different ilk are addressed in An Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology by Bob Curran (Contemporary, Feb. 2000), The Great Encyclopedia of Faeries by Pierre Dubois (Simon & Schuster, Apr. 2000) and The Extraterrestrial Encyclopedia: An Alphabetical Reference to All Life in the Universe by David Darling (Times Books, Apr. 2000).
Reference -- the Net Result
Finally, no discussion of reference providers can conclude without taking the Internet into account. The responses from publishers vary when asked if the millions of researchers surfing the Internet for data are creating a drag on reference book sales. Most assert that books remain the authoritative source for information, the validity of which found on countless Web sites is utterly suspect. Penguin's Burch remarks that anyone wanting to discern the meaning of a mathematics term will crack open the Penguin dictionary rather than boot up a computer. Others mention with considerable alarm the mind-boggling occasion of the Encyclopaedia Britannica going online for free last month. Still others remark -- off the record -- that book sales have dipped a bit lately, which has no doubt fueled the aforementioned necessity to create books with heightened popular appeal.
It is worth knowing that next March, Oxford University Press will make its Oxford English Dictionary and the 24-volume American National Biography available online in a hierarchy of paid subscriber options. And a year from this month, Grove's Dictionaries will publish the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in a 29-volume print edition ($4850 preceded by lower pre-pub prices) and will make it available online as well ($650/year for individuals; $1200/year for libraries).
With these high-ticket cyberspace offerings lining up with a free Britannica, the Internet is nothing if not a work in progress -- with unknown shakeouts still to come. In an intriguing reversal, Merriam-Webster is preparing a new print work, Merriam-Webster's College Encyclopedia for next June, a volume exploiting M-W's association with the Britannica by drawing 25,000 articles from that publication's vast holdings. Still, when it comes to the Internet, Merriam-Webster's Morse has some encouraging words: "When we decided to make the Collegiate Dictionary free on the Web, we wondered if it would hurt sales. Instead, the Web site has become one of the most gratifying successes of our business now. We have 15 million page views per month on the site, and sales have not been hurt at all. In fact, the opposite seems to happen. People discover Merriam-Webster on the Web. And another thing, as banal as it sounds, our online experience proves that people do use a dictionary. Dictionary people tell themselves that people do, but there's no way of knowing for sure. The Web demonstrates that people actually do use the dictionary, and now we know what words people look up the most. We can tell if we've put the right words in. We have e-mail addresses throughout the site for people to suggest word additions."
Morse reports that the word referred to most frequently is paradigm -- which certainly describes reference publishing as a competitive arena in the information marketplace.
| Kid-Pleasing Reference on the Rise For children, the thought of dictionaries, atlases and multivolume encyclopedias is apt to conjure up images of long, boring hours of library research. In recent years, however, much effort has been expended to make volumes of facts, history and biography both practical and appealing -- and even fun. While competition from electronic media is
Barish's list at Scholastic includes traditional reference volumes such as the Scholastic Children's Dictionary, which has sold more than one million copies in the trade since its publication in fall 1996, as well as some titles that she says build on the core of successful reference -- strong visuals, authenticity and clear presentation -- by taking an innovative approach to the subject matter. Coming from Scholastic Reference in the spring is a title that Barish is particularly excited about. Girls: The History of Growing Up Female in America by Penny Colman will cover "how the perception of women has changed over the years," a topic that, Barish says, hasn't been dealt with in such depth for young readers. Reference is "the bedrock of the children's publishing program" at DK, states Neal Porter, v-p and publisher of the children's group, but even with the company's solid reputation in the field, Porter indicates some new directions for the near future. The plan is to build on a successful format -- the Eyewitness line -- by extending the subject matter. Previous DK Eyewitness titles were edited in the U.K. and imported to the U.S. market, with the result that they leaned toward subjects of interest to a British audience. To address what Porter calls "a huge gap in the backlist," DK is producing volumes focusing on subjects unique to life in America that will be edited here in the States. This fall, for example, the Eyewitness line added Football, which will be followed in the spring with Baseball and Presidents, compiled in association with the Smithsonian Institution. The DK Children's Illustrated Encyclopedia, which has sold 76,000 copies since it appeared two years ago, is also slated to be updated, reorganized and expanded with subjects that reflect an American perspective. It has a projected publication date sometime in 2000 or 2001. Both Barish and Porter acknowledge that the look of reference books has been influenced by the fact that these days children often prefer to get information from electronic sources, but they both believe that the two formats can complement each other rather than compete (DK offers some of its volumes with a free CD-ROM to reinforce the complementary nature of the two mediums). However, Jennifer Anglin, owner of Enchanted Forest in Dallas, reports that sales of reference titles in her store have definitely been affected by the growing use of the Internet and CD-ROMs. At Enchanted Forest, reference books that stand out in a crowded field are the ones that satisfy adults but also take a child's point of view. According to Anglin, books such as those in Oxford's Smelly Old History series (with more than half a million copies sold in 25 languages throughout the world) and Hyperion's I Was There series fill the bill. Her favorite hand-sell of the moment is the latest I Was There title, Secrets of the Mummies: Uncovering the Bodies of Ancient Egyptians by Shelley Tanaka, illus. by Greg Ruhl, which was released in September. "It's great to sell to teachers and parents because it has history and a story and kids, especially third-grade boys, love the gory pictures." Beth Puffer, manager and buyer at Bank Street College Bookstore on New York City's Upper West Side, reports that her store d s well with volumes that offer facts and history in appealing formats, such as Candlewick's large-format News line, which was launched in fall 1996 and has more than 136,000 copies in print. Puffer has also been successful with Scholastic's Horrible Histories, geared toward kids nine-12. With cartoons, jokes and snide commentary, Puffer points out, the series is guaranteed to appeal to kids. While she still sells dictionaries, atlases and other traditional reference volumes, Puffer says that the niche is well filled by such companies as DK and EDC/Usborne. "There was a great need for these books," she comments but observes that there seems to be a surplus of them now. As a result of a perceived glut of traditional reference books for children, publishers who have made a name for themselves as suppliers of this material face the challenge of updating the look of their books and pursuing new formats and subjects. At Barron's, which has a strong backlist of children's reference -- including dictionaries, thesauri and compilations of statistics such as Barron's Illustrated Fact Finder, interactive books for younger children are becoming a strong avenue for sales. According to Grace Freedson, managing editor and director of acquisitions, volumes such as 1998's The Children's Pictorial Atlas of the World, which targets readers 4-6, succeeds because of its "hands-on approach" and the inclusion of stickers, a passport and activities. Children's publishers are clearly putting a lot of thought into making reference material that is both educational and enticing. By utilizing colorful graphics, storytelling, author-driven texts, humor and even silliness, publishers seem to have developed a new formula for success. As a result, the line between traditional reference materials and the new forms will likely continue to blur, opening up the field to further innovation. -- Cindi di Marzo |
