Reference Books You Can't Help Browsing In

[Extollager]

Dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, gazetteers, almanacs that you take to look up something, and often find yourself reading around in?

Mine include these favorites:

Peter Nicholls, ed. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (1979)
John Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (in the UK the book is The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction) (1989)

 

[Randy M.]

That Clute and the other Clute, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy.

One of the joys lost in looking up words online is browsing a dictionary and seeing unfamiliar words and getting in lost in one after the other.

 

[Toby Frost]

Definitely this! It has terrific illustrations.

I used to be fascinated by dinosaurs as a child (I still think they're great) and some of my dinosaur books were fairly serious. I liked this one in particular, although there were others.

I've also ended up with a small collection of coffee-table type design books, usually "the art of" some film or game that I found particularly interesting to look at. I'm not sure that they count here.

 

[Rodders]

I've always been fascinated with maps and Atlases. Nothing specific, but you can get lost in them.

Encyclopaedia's are always a wonderful way to kill time. Everything's online now, but I remember being fascinated with a the Encyclopaedia of things that never were by Michael Page.


The Star Trek and Star Wars encyclopaedia of old were also a great was to spend time, but they're all on line now and it's not the same.

 

[hitmouse]

Yes to the Peter Nichols SF Encyclopedia (which had a different cover in the UK), and the Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

This has been my favourite for looking-up-something-specific-leading-to-prolonged-browsing for a number of years now:

Alan Davidson was a very interesting man.

I am also a bit of a sucker for photography books, and this is my all-time favourite:

 

[KGeo777]

I have the Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were


The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural 1986 is another.

 

[Astro Pen]

(Yes area 51 is included along with less famous but no less interesting places like the Rosslyn Chapel vault, sealed in 1690 and never re opened)

 

[Ray Zdybrow]

Collins Complete Guide To British Trees
McGee on Food & Cooking
Roget’s Thesaurus (1962 edition)

 

[AE35Unit]

The Aircraft Book: The Definitive Visual History. A great book to dip into and also to read through as its laid out like a timeline.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Tolkien's book of his watercolour illustrations.

 

[Foxbat]

A couple of my favourites

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Talking of art, I forgot to mention Bruce Pennington's book, which I enjoy annually.

 

[Foxbat]

Talking of art, I forgot to mention Bruce Pennington's book, which I enjoy annually.

The name was familiar but had to Google. Nice stuff. A bit like Roger Dean, I thought, but with less reliance on an airbrush.

 

[elvet]

I love looking through this book and have it at the office to use for a reference for clients.

Book Of The Cat​

By Michael Wright​

 

[JunkMonkey]

I guess my most opened reference book at the moment is The Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French

Not that much of it is sticking but sometimes I find myself reading a book or a comic and thinking 'oho! that doesn't mean quite what I think it says' and go looking it up here to find out I was right even if I didn't remember the details. So some some grains of knowledge are still able to get through. (Which is nice to know.)
And Jonathon Green's : Chambers Dictionary of Slang is a well thumbed book too. Useful in that it gives the dates when slang terms came into use and what they meant in different decades/centuries. The same word (slang especially) can often mean totally different things at different times.

 

[pogopossum]

Jo Walton's An Informal Histry of the Hugos.

Walton's book is an invaluable history with detailed commentary, not just on the Hugos up to 2000 but also on other awards and on works that did not get prized.
It is based on her TOR blog. Other commentators include Rich Horton and Gardner Dozois.
Of particular interest to me was the coverage of shorter work, Novella, Novelette & Short Stories in addition to Novels.

 

[KGeo777]

The New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology is another I have looked at extensively.