Books That Edify

ONE of the standard American works of reference — the World Book Encyclopedia (The Quarrie Corporation), carefully brought up to dale — is appearing this year. Let me tell you something about it, and then perhaps I may have space at the end to set down some of my reasons for thinking its publication with 1947 revisions an event of considerable significance. Although it is planned as a source of information for youngsters in school, it can be, and often is, consulted by grown-up citizens, among whom I range myself.

Don’t forget that all of us, in many facets and aspects of our personalities, are “young” in the sense of being uninformed and inexperienced. For instance, I am quite my own age (close to seventy) as to French literature, because that has been a special interest of mine nearly all my life. But in the matter of information about, say, ocean currents, or the ethnology of the people of Nicaragua,

I cannot claim a mental age of more than twelve. That is the age for which these cheerful, colorful volumes of bright red and blue were produced. For me too, this outward aspect is encouraging. It suggests to me (as to the eighth-grader) that what I find inside will not, by its cold scholarly rigidity, swamp and drown my not very deep or keen (but all the same living) interest in a subject, aroused perhaps by a casual reference in something I have been reading.

Open any volume and you will find another device, tried and ancient and familiar, but only recently accepted by the inner circle of educational scholars-visual presentation of facts formerly treated only in words. Pictures, diagrams, maps. How well I remember the thrill such diagrams brought me as a young girl. There was an article about how to tie knots, written for the then equivalent of Girl and Boy Scouts. Neither I nor my friends had any particular interest in ropes, but we used to hang over those diagrams, fascinated by the light they shed. As our young eyes followed the ins and outs of the ropes there on the page, we had the enchanted, astonished sensation familiar to us when in winter we rubbed a place clear on a frosted window and suddenly saw, alive and vivid, the world outside which had been shadowy dimness.

The pages of the new edition of this encyclopedia are full of such diagrams, making clear, as no words could, the relation of air pockets to flying airplanes, the way a bird’s gizzard works compared to a regular stomach, the effect a glacier has on the earth beneath it, the physics of the struggle between the speed of the moon and the earth’s gravity. And what illustrations! Color flashes its “stop and look" signal on so many pages that, like a true Vermonter, I ask myself wildly wherever did the money come from.

All kinds of other pictures, too. Reproductions, not of first-rate quality but respectable, of old prints and engravings, as in the article on Lady Jane Grey, and on the Confederate cruiser Alabama. Reproductions of especially good book illustrations. Lots of pictographs, and these are very costly. Hardly a page without its appeal to the eye as well as to the reading mind. As I look at them, it occurs to me that the book would be fascinating to the younger brother or sister of the twelve-year-old; that it would be a pleasure to one of my younger grandchildren as well as to me.

But it would be light-minded and intellectually irresponsible to lay too much stress on pictures.

The text of a book of this kind is the real test of its quality. It is when I turn my attention to that core of the effort that I most appreciate the slogging hard work which must have gone into this manual for all of us. I have had no connection with this undertaking, know about it nothing more than can be seen in the finished volumes. But I have had a good deal of experience with other publications which require the united — well, anyhow, the combined— efforts of many writers and editors. And whether you have had such experience or not, you don’t need to be told that human nature must be very much in evidence at every phase of the longdrawn-out undertaking.

I note, for instance, with warm approval that practically all these articles are signed by the initials of those who wrote them, following the intellectually respectable method of encyclopedias for adults. If you look back at the first volume, you will find a very long list of specialists who have written these articles. Look up one, say the article on Gandhi.

You will find that it is by the Professor of Eastern History and Oriental Institutions at the University of Chicago. The piece on the Grimm fairy tales (an especially intelligent article) was written by the Professor of Literature in a highly respected urban university.

The sheer endurance required to get together such a list of contributors, the mountains of letters which must have been written to and by them, the amount of tact, flexibility, firmness, required to “handle" scholars with good reasons to demand respectful treatment, the infinite number of workhours expended to verify and check their work, to induce them to accept editorial changes, and to make sure the editorial changes are good ones — I am fairly awed by the thought of it.

There is one question which comes naturally into the minds of experienced Americans, in regard to such a reference work, intended to be read by all kinds of youngsters in all kinds of schools, as well as by their parents; by the filling-station man and his wife; by the Maine farmer whose son has just gone to live in Michigan, and who wants to know something (not too much) about that state; by the refrigerator salesman who sees a mention of iron pyrites in his newspaper and wants to know more about that mineral; by the man who reads the gas meter; by the learned professor of Middle High German who knows no more than I do, or the twelve-year-old, about the role played in modern industry by “grinding tools”; by the railroad ticketseller whose high school daughter needs for her next day’s recitation to know something about the Edict of Nantes. Every one of those readers is embedded in a matrix of fixed ideas and prejudices. How, in a vast heterogeneous federation of states like ours, can any reference book be put together which, in many items, will not clash loudly with convictions held by many of its readers? Is the only solution so to dilute the controversial subjects that they have no taste of reality left in them?

I turned to the article in the World Book on the Edict of Nantes and its revocation, feeling that subject to be a live wire of controversy if there ever was one. I found a brief, plain, factual, accurate (as far as it went, and it went far enough for all ordinary purposes), simplified statement of what happened in France at. that time. No color of condemnation, no color of condoning, no implied or open accusation, no self-defensive count era ccusation. Anyone who read that article would know enough about the Edict of Nantes to understand references to if in his reading-in his ordinary reading, that is, such as we do in matters for which we have not a specialist’s concern.

Then I looked up the treatment of this subject in my beloved Britannica, daily counselor and teacher. The article was twice as long as in the book for the twelve-year-old (and don’t forget that this is my mental age and that of the Professor of German and of the railroad ticket-seller when it comes to information about whales and grinding tools). And in the first; line of the Britannica statement was the word “promulgated,” Now I have no personal acquaintance with these learned specialists, but my observation of human nature makes me pretty sure that if the word “promulgated ” did not come readily to the pen of the distinguished professor w ho wrote the article in the book for the voting, I miss my guess. But it was not in the article as printed in the World Book. There was not a dictionary word in that statement. It was plain, readable, if undistinguished English. Who took out “promulgated”? The author himself, after suggestions from the editorial board.”Or an editor at headquarters? If, as seems likely, some sparks flew over it, there is no trace of them in the finished work.

Later on in the Britannica, I found the statement that by the terms of the Edict of Nantes, “Protestants could also worship in two towns in each bailhage and sénéechaussée.” I have long studied French history, off and on, but I wouldn’t know, without looking them up, what kinds of governmental units are represented by those words. The reference book for the twelve-year-old tells us that “Protestants were allowed freedom of worship in about seventy-five towns.”

Now the Britannica article with those long French words looks on the page more like “scholarly accuracy,” doesn’t it? It is more accurate—for a specialist in French history. For the twelve-yearold. for the filling-station man, and for me, it makes no sense at all. We not only do not know what sénéchaussées are, but we haven’t the slightest idea how many of them t here were in France in 1598. And I make bold to claim that our ignorance is not due to the mediocrity inevitably caused (we sometimes hear) by democracy, but to the fact that, there is no earthly reason why we should know that fact.

The troubling question about the possibility of presenting, for general reading, subjects about which people have strongly conflicting convictions was answered by an item in the explanation about how this book was put together. Every article was submitted to some expert reader other than the author. Articles touching on the Roman Catholic Church, I learned, were all read and passed on by Monsignor Sheen. I looked up to see who wrote the article in question. It was Professor Shapiro of the City College of New York. I maintain that any citizen of our democracy can, with full confidence in the mighly American principle of checks and balances, lean his whole weight on an article about the Edict of Nantes written by a man called Shapiro, passed on by a man called Sheen, and edited to clarity by responsible experts in the art of making information readable.

I also maintain that the existence of such works of reference (for this is not the only one — I know and admire another standard work of this kind, Compton’s) has something to say to people scrutinizing democracy, anxious (or hopeful) about its ability to invent institutions to meet its changing needs.

One of the obvious needs of democracy is for a wider and wider distribution, among its ordinary citizens, of the raw materials of understanding. Understanding is made up of two elements: one, an exact, detailed, accurate knowledge of, and skill in, some one among the activities of mankind, such knowledge as the scientist gets by looking patiently through a microscope. But unless the practitioner of this skill acquires the second of the elements of understanding — that is, some idea of its relation to the whole of which it is a part — his precisely accurate knowledge will be but a snare and a stumbling block.

The scientist gets his precise vision of one corner of his subject by the great, the enormous, the prime intellectual virtue of true scholarly accuracy, the standard for which can never be too high. But if he does not get a more general acquaintance with the whole human landscape, he is correctly estimated as a useless high-brow, and deservedly ignored by those who attempt to manage human life with intelligence.

The ordinary man gets this exact, precise mastery of one part of the whole in his work. The trouble shooter in a repair garage acquires the intellectual arts of how to weigh evidence and to prove by elimination, although he may never have heard the names of these mental processes. He greatly needs some mental tools to widen his general information about things which have no connection with ailing automobiles. If he doesn’t so widen his general grasp on the nature of things, Hitler gets him. The citizen of a democracy needs a whole mind in a whole body as the citizen of a totalitarian state does not.

One of the devices to meet this need is book education. Our American democracy has been clawing its way as fast as it could towards success in giving book education to those of our people younger than the earning-a-living age. It is now going forward in the attempt to do more of this for the older folks.

Our country is rich, materially. Some of that wealth is being used to finance (not by the state but by ordinary business processes) educational undertakings like these sound people’s encyclopedias. They cost fabulous sums to prepare, obviously. But because we are an immense and, relatively speaking, well-to-do country, enormous sales can be counted on to offset the cost. Here is democracy using its own home-grown tools to take care of its own needs.

It looks to me like a perfectly functional expression of our American way of doing things, depending solely on the resources and skills—intellectual, financial, administrative, educational—of our big democracy, lumbering forward to meet the future, not with elegance and distinction, perhaps, but with honesty and power.