You Could Look It Up (39 page)

The first edition of the
Almanack
was followed by a second in the next year, and then a third—it became an institution, and a remarkably consistent one. As Winder notes, “We know next to nothing about the way the early volumes … were assembled.”
22
As Wisden’s role declined, the sportswriter W. H. Knight stepped in. The title went through a few permutations:
The Cricketer’s Almanack
became
The Cricketers’ Almanack
in 1869, and a year later
John Wisden’s Cricketer’s Almanack
to give the founder more prominence. Cancer took Wisden’s life in 1884, but it did not affect the success of his publishing franchise. By that time the
Almanack
was edited by George West, the
Times
cricket correspondent. And the book kept growing, so that by 1892 it had reached 448 pages. Prospects for continued publication looked grim during the Great War, which threatened to put an end to the great Victorian sporting guide as it had put an end to so many Victorian institutions. But somehow the publishers kept it going, even though the tone of the book grew melancholy. Nearly two thousand cricketers were killed in combat, and the 1915 edition of
Wisden
featured forty-eight pages of obituaries.
23

Once the war was over, the annual
Almanack
resumed its growth. It reached 727 pages in 1920; in 1924, it passed a thousand pages for the first time. Big changes came in 1938. The
Almanack
was acquired by a new publisher, J. Whitaker & Sons, who reorganized the book. Countries were now put in alphabetical order, and births and deaths were moved to the end of the book. Whitaker put money into improving the quality of the photographs. Most important, though, they added women’s cricket to the venerable guide.

The Blitz in 1940 wiped out the company’s archives, so that much of the early history of the
Almanack
is now lost, but the franchise continued to thrive, and more than a century and a half after the guide’s premiere, its popularity is undimmed: it remains the world’s longest-running and most widely read reference book on sports. “The Almanack, like cricket itself,” the historian David Kynaston wrote, “represents something deep in the English psyche.” For many it is a passion. “If I knew I was going to die today,” the mathematician G. H. Hardy said, “I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.” Alec Waugh, the brother of Evelyn, dubbed it “the cricketer’s bible” in the
London Mercury
, and the language used to describe it verges on the theological. Even Robert Runcie, then Archbishop of Canterbury, addressed the annual Wisden dinner in 1997 with a devotional metaphor: “All faiths need a sacred text. It’s a big help if the faithful come to believe that it is well nigh infallible.”
24

Over the book’s first 150 years,
Wisden
has taken up 133,000 pages, and they are interesting even to those who care nothing for cricket. John Fowles, Terence Rattigan, Sam Mendes, and King George VI all make cameo appearances, having played games that made it into the book. “Mr S. V. Beckett” appeared in 1925–26, and the notice of his death in 1989 described him as a left-hand opening batsman and left-arm medium-pace bowler and praised his thirty-five runs in four innings. Only in the last sentence does the obituary acknowledge, almost as an afterthought, that he was also “one of the important literary figures of the twentieth century.” As befits a venerable reference book,
Wisden
has occasionally proven helpful in fields seemingly far from cricket. The British Library spent £27,500 for more than a hundred letters by the late playwright Harold Pinter. They all came from the years 1948 to 1960 but bore no more specific dates. A scholar, noticing references to cricket in
nearly all of Pinter’s letters, turned to Wisden to pin down when each was written. Where Pinter wrote of cricketer Doug Padgett, “Didn’t he get a century yesterday, to bear out your words? … And what about Wilson being called back to continue his innings?,” the librarians were able to turn to Wisden to discover that it had to be a reference to the Yorkshire–Warwickshire match of July 23, 1955.
25

The
Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack
is still published annually; it has never missed a year since 1864. Recent editions, published since 2008 by Bloomsbury, run around seventeen hundred pages a year and cover men’s and women’s cricket around the world. The game has changed a great deal since that first edition, and
Wisden
reflects those changes: the first South African was named Leading Cricketer of the Year in 2007, and the first Bangladeshi and Irish cricketers were in the top five in 2011. Claire Taylor was the first woman to make it into the top five in 2009. But it is still deeply conservative. The
Almanack
, with its iconic mustard-yellow jacket, has become an institution, and like so many institutions, it is slow to change. The few times the editors mustered up the courage to change direction—as when, in 1987, Graeme Wright decided to remove the old-fashioned laws of cricket from the guide—popular outcry forced them back in. The early volumes sell for thousands of pounds, because “A shelf-full of Wisdens,” wrote sports historian Patrick Kidd, “is a sign of civilisation and a curious mind.”
26

It is only natural that the earliest reference books should be concerned with matters of life and death: promising an eye for an eye, prescribing remedies for diseases, keeping sailors from shipwreck on rocky coasts. But it is a testimony to the reference book’s changing value in the culture that it was eventually adapted to purposes less utilitarian. The bibliography of game- and sport-related reference books is now long, and it includes many beloved titles. Some (like Hoyle’s) teach particular skills to the players; others (like Wisden’s) provide handy information for those on the sidelines; but they are all concerned with maximizing the pleasure that people take in their pastimes.

CHAPTER
15 ½

OUT OF PRINT

Reference books have a natural life cycle: most have their day and are no more; the lucky few fill a niche and catch on. Time passes, and the work's shortcomings become clear—whether they were there from the beginning or imposed only by the passage of time. The publisher decides the world needs a revised version, and so appears the second edition. If all goes well, there may be a third, a fourth … A handful of fabulously successful reference works have histories that extend across centuries:
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack
has not missed an annual installment in more than a century and a half, Merriam-Webster's latest dictionaries are part of a direct lineage going back to
1828
, and the
Dictionnaire de l'Académie française
will add its in-progress ninth edition to a series going all the way back to
1694
. But most do not last nearly that long—they might get a second, even a third edition, and then they lapse into obscurity.

This much is natural. Every so often, though, there are episodes that seem to kill off entire genres, the bibliographical equivalent of a biological mass extinction. The Russian Revolution killed off a slew of dictionaries and encyclopedias from the czarist era. The invention of the pocket calculator put paid to the table of logarithms and sines. And we are now in the middle of one of the biggest mass extinctions ever. The name of the invasive species is the Internet.

Many once-proud reference franchises have fallen in the last few years. The
Brockhaus Enzyklopädie
traces its genealogy to Renatus Gotthelf Löbel and Christian Wilhelm Franke's
Conversations-Lexikon
(1796–1808), and it made it to a twenty-first edition in thirty volumes (2005–6). But after thriving for two centuries, Brockhaus could not figure out how to sell encyclopedias in the digital age. In 2009 they sold the
intellectual property and fired the editorial staff. The legendary
Britannica
has been struggling mightily after several serious missteps since the mid-1990s. The company announced in 2012 that the 2010 version would be the last to appear in print—no surprise, now that printed books have fallen to less than one percent of the company's revenue.

Even for titles that have stayed healthy, print publication is unmistakably threatened. The
Oxford English Dictionary
is an institution, and it is unthinkable that it should shut down operation anytime soon—but the publishers are agnostic on whether there will be any further print editions.
1
The situation is the same at Merriam-Webster: a
Webster's Fourth
is in preparation, but no one can say whether it will have a physical existence.

This should not be an occasion for lamentation. Most of the effects of computerizing reference books are unambiguously good. Making them available in electronic form allows for searches that were unthinkable in the past. With the print
OED
, readers can search only by headword; with the online
OED
, they can look for all the words that entered English from Arabic between 1400 and 1500. (The answer is nine:
Alcoran
,
athanor
,
azoth
,
El Nath
,
gerfaunt
,
khan
,
Ramadan
,
resalgar
, and
sebesten
.) That would have been the work of years; it now takes seconds.

Online publication also makes possible much more frequent updates than were possible with books. Some of the most important reference books—the
Oxford English Dictionary
, the
Dictionary of National Biography
—average one, two, or maybe three editions a century, a pace determined by the world of print. With the references of the future, revisions could appear two or three times a year. It all depends on what we mean by “edition”: the notion of numbered editions may be a relic of print culture that vanishes in the electronic age. The third edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
, for instance, now in progress, may well be the last one to bear a number; later we may see only
OED
-of-the-afternoon-of-the-sixteenth-of-June-around-four-o'clock. The benefits of such currency for the users are obvious, though whether the editors and presses want the headaches of managing such perpetual flux, a Trotskyite permanent revolution, is an open question.

While online publication offers savings in materials, it also introduces new expenses and new challenges. Subscriptions and site licenses
are the means publishers have devised to collect money for Internet-based resources, though pricing schemes are still being worked out. But those without institutional support may be shut out of the digital future: those without university IDs, even those with IDs from less affluent universities, may be left in the cold. In the old days, they could use expensive books in a library for free—distinguished professors from Ivy League universities and part-time lecturers at community colleges have always been on an equal footing in the New York Public Library, all drawing on the same resources. But when those resources are linked to student and faculty ID numbers, the computer age may make research impossible for the less fortunate. Some publishers have experimented with individual subscriptions and pay-per-view plans, but prices are almost always beyond the means of private researchers. The stratification of the academic haves and have-nots is already too pronounced, and the brave new research world may only make it worse.

When Britannica announced the end of their print edition, many declared they will miss the old hard copy. “I know I sound like a crotchety old grandfather on the porch reminiscing about the good old days of rumble seats,” admits journalist A. J. Jacobs, who read the whole
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, “but I loved having pages you could actually turn, not click or swipe. I adored the literal weight of each volume (4 pounds), which somehow lent it metaphorical gravitas as well. I fell hard for the familiar smell of leatherette covers and the crinkling of the pages.”
2
And some educators are concerned that the loss is more than sentimental: “The internet and its search boxes,” a school librarian wrote, “do not encourage a sense of wonder… . We work to create inquiry-driven critical thinking in our students while we systematically remove the tools necessary to stimulate such thought.”
3
“I love encyclopedias,” a reference librarian wrote,

and will miss the printed Encyclopaedia Britannica… . But we live in a complex world, too big for a few hundred people to cover completely, and too fast-moving for print volumes to keep up.
4

But most of those who wipe away a tear of regret have to admit this is what progress looks like.