Anyone who loves reading knows the pleasure of casually looking up the odd word or fact in the dictionary or encyclopedia. There’s a certain gratification in learning that “agerasia” refers to “the non-appearance of the signs of age,” or that the word “self,” which originally meant “same,” only recently replaced “soul” as the most common noun for personhood in English, or that the tallest person ever recorded measured 8 feet 11.1 inches tall.
As Jack Lynch shows in You Could Look It Up, a history of fifty reference works from The Code of Hammurabi to Wikipedia, it’s equally entertaining to learn about the writers and editors who went to great lengths to collect and distill these facts—some greater than others.
Pliny the Elder had manuscripts read to him day and night—over dinner, in his bath, traveling in his sedan chair.
Pliny the Elder, for example, wrote his thirty-seven-volume Naturalis historia, which contained 2,495 entries on all of the natural objects known at the time, in just two years. He had manuscripts read to him day and night—over dinner, in his bath, traveling in his sedan chair—and claimed to have noted 20,000 “things of importance” pulled from 2,000 works. One modern scholar, Lynch notes, calls Pliny’s tally “a severe underestimate.” His work came to an unfortunate end when he died rushing towards an erupting Vesuvius in a pique of curiosity.
Other works were less dangerous to prepare but just as important. Theophrastus—Aristotle’s
