You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

A history of reference books and other materials from ancient Sumerian vocabulary lists down to Wikipedia highlighting some outstanding examples of different types in rough chronological order.

Lots of interesting information here, but, perhaps, like its subject matter best dipped into rather than read through.

Pleasantly surprised, not at all dry. Nice overview of the making of some of the seminal reference works with a bit of philosophy on the nature of gathered knowledge. Fun

A splendid and informative roster of 50 of the most important reference books of Western Civilization (the stupendous accomplishments of Chinese and Japanese encyclopedists are mentioned in passing). I don't hold it against the author that Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire Historique et Critique is consigned to a few paragraphs in the chapter on Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie as it pleases me to find it mentioned at all.

In short, a pleasant read that sent me scrambling on more than one occasion to archive.org to download pdf's of eccentric titles for my burgeoning library of ebooks.

An entertaining and informative collection of light essays on books that we normally take for granted.