Photo: austinevanOur resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own — it needn’t have anything to do with quotations — send it along here.
An article by Donald Altschiller in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal named the five reference books essential for every home library:
1. World Almanac
2. Yale Book of Quotations
3. Oxford Atlas of the World
4. Merck Manual of Medical Information
5. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
Some might quibble with the placement of the World Almanac ahead of the No. 2 book, but the list is a provocative one.
In a heavily online-oriented world, is there still a place for printed reference volumes that provide information not available on the Web or present information more conveniently than similar online sources? Can readers of this blog suggest other print reference books that are still desirable for home libraries?
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Um, welcome to 2008, friends. I don’t own a hard-bound book that can compete with the following:
CIA World Factbook — online
Wikipedia, Wikisource, Google Book Search, Google scholar, Project Gutenberg
Encyclopedia Brittanica — online
American Heritage dictionary — online
OED — online (paid access)
New York Times archives — online
EurekAlert, Medline, city-data, etc (for my line of work) — online
Plain old Google search — online
Perry’s Chemical Engineers’ Handbook.
Chicago Manual of Style
The Holy Bible, if only just for literary allusions.
“The New York Public Library Desk Reference” is a 1-volume compendium of the most frequently-requested data. Sports statistics, national and international holidays, astronomical info, military ranks, how to format a business letter, how to address a foreign dignitary…
It’s a pretty good all-in-one resource.
i’m with ben. who needs dead trees on shelves when you have a laptop and wifi?
The Holy Bible – For Direction, Comfort, and Strength.
There may indeed still be books with information that is either unavailable on the internet or more convenient in print, but it’s my feeling that they’ll be obsolete soon enough. There is no longer any need to cut down perfectly good trees to spread information and knowledge, and plenty of environmental and business reasons not to. Books were perhaps the most important invention of mankind until the internet was invented.