Reference-book writing is one of those jobs that makes you sound like a bit of a know-all, but really I'm a person who only knows a little and enjoys delving further. Letting other people in on what I've found out is a big part of the fun. Getting paid is an even bigger part of it.
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Since 1989, I have been running my own freelance operation, writing, editing, and contributing to reference books of various kinds and supplying publishers and packagers with a high-quality service in well-researched and well-written copy. I've worked for the encyclopedia giants, World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. I have also worked for such companies as Kingfisher, Harrap, and the children's publisher Cherrytree, currently part of Evans Brothers. I've also tried my hand at Web design.
You won't see my name prominently displayed on the title pages of many books because most of my work has been done on encyclopedias where editors work as a team. But I am the author of a few books, notably Harrap's English Punctuation and Hyphenation (1990) and a series of Business in Action books for Cherrytree – company profiles designed for 14- and 15-year-olds.
I write on a wide range of subjects, including music, astronomy and popular science, history, archaeology, biography, and geography. The variety of encyclopedia and reference work for a general editor is amazing. The job is up-to-the-minute journalism one moment, deep academic research the next. I like it.
I started in reference publishing in 1971 by joining the packager Laurence Urdang Dictionaries Ltd, part of Laurence Urdang Associates (now Market House Books) as an editor. There I worked on dictionaries and single-volume encyclopedias compiled for large companies such as Collins and Macmillan. I gained experience as a pronunciation editor, writing transcriptions of words into the International Phonetic Alphabet, but I also drafted definitions and etymologies. I was a member of the team that produced the highly acclaimed Collins English Dictionary. First published in 1979, it's now in its fifth edition. In addition, I worked on books for Hamlyn and Longman.
In 1977, I moved on into multivolume encyclopedias, joining the UK editorial offices of World Book Encyclopedia. I wrote or commissioned numerous illustrated articles on subjects relating to the UK and Ireland for one of World Book's national supplements, I also compiled material for inclusion in the World Book Year Book. After seven years with World Book and a brief spell with the Central Office of Information in London editing government press releases and the like, I joined Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1986. For the three years before I started my own consultancy, I was an associate editor and contributor on EB's juvenile set Children's Britannica. I also edited the annual update to this set, the Children's Britannica Yearbook.
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It sounds like a truism to say so, but encyclopedia and reference-book compilation really is fascinating. It's not so much to do with the actual gathering, authentication, organization and presentation of information to a would-be reader, though that is engrossing in itself. It's more to do with the way modern reference works are conceived and editorially planned in the electronic age.
When I first started in reference publishing, there was a tendency for the planners to cannibalize earlier work. Mostly this was to cut costs and save time. The word list for a new dictionary, for instance, was built around a core of vocabulary that was culled from the headwords in five earlier dictionaries of comparable size and range. To this core were added new words and phrases picked up from newspapers and magazines, radio and television, modern novels, and works of non-fiction. Writers on special subject areas such as science or religion would bring in new vocabulary from their own fields of study, taken from textbooks, learned journals, and the like. Even the whims of scientists came into play. Did you know, for instance, that the atomic physicist Murray Gell-Mann named an elementary particle the quark because he found that particular word in James Joyce's Finnigan's Wake? Oh, you did!
Encyclopedias were in many ways dictionaries "writ large": they had articles rather than definitions. But they too relied a lot on what had gone before, often simply updating their own previous editions, adding in new entries on developing specialist subjects and turfing out what was considered obsolete. Such a state of affairs couldn't last in our fast-changing world. Not even our interpretation of past historical events can remain unaltered. Research brings new information to light all the time. Encyclopedists today can't just keep repainting the Forth Bridge. They have to keep rebuilding it!
Putting together a completely new general hard-copy encyclopedia from scratch has always been very expensive in the case of a single-volume work, prohibitive now in the case of a multivolume set like Britannica. Why? Because paper is costly and wastes natural resources. Moreover, multivolume works in particular are expensive to store and can't be easily sold through conventional bookstores because they take up too much space. Worse still, an encyclopedia becomes out of date within five years. Occasionally, it can be sooner! The first international version of World Book Encyclopedia was published in January 1992 after three years in the making. The last pages had gone through the press in October 1991. What happened in December 1991? The Soviet Union collapsed.
We still compile the core databases of encyclopedias by building judiciously on previous editions, though hopefully not on the actual work of competitors: that would be at worst plagiarism, at best "digging bones from other people's graveyards", as a former World Book editor once put it. The big difference today is that we have the massive information resources of the Internet. Producing encyclopedias and other reference material is now a largely paperless procedure. It is easier to build new databases from scratch, though it's still expensive to do so. Editors find themselves trawling through books and journals and using seach engines on the Web to bring together new resources of information. When you have a comprehensive database across a wide range of subjects, you make it work for you, as Helicon does with its products for example, which are extracted from the same massive resource. Once you have captured the information, though, together with the software applications needed to access it, making multiple copies of it on CD-ROMs is cheap, a fraction of the cost of printing sets of bulky books. World Book and Britannica have finally ditched their printed sets altogether in favour of the CD-ROM and updates via the Web. As information quickly changes, they can change their content to reflect it and deliver it to the user in many imaginative ways.
The entry of World Book and Britannica into the electronic market has been late – way behind Encarta (which I believe was never conceived as a printed publication) or Compton's or Grolier – but that doesn't matter so much, The fact is, they are here now. And they are cheap to own. Encyclopedia and reference publishing has fully entered a new era, and I personally wouldn't miss it for the world.
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You can find out more about my business as a writer and editor of reference books by clicking on the Refer to Experience area of this Website. In that section you'll find an up-to-date list of the puiblications I have worked on and an account of the services I offer. Remember to click on Return to SITE INDEX (top of this column) or on the daffodil logo on the left to access the full site map to this Website.
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