A Basic Home Reference Library for the College Graduate

YOUR basic home reference library will be determined by who you are, what you do, and where you live. Lawyer, banker, doctor, writer, realtor, housewife; east, west, north, south: each will need his or her own books of reference. Is there such a thing as an average man or woman college graduate and a library to suit? I think not. Individual differences in taste and need are infinite; regional interests are extremely varied.

So any choice of 25 basic home reference books is arbitrary. My selections are mostly orthodox, although I have salted in a few eyebrow-raisers. Alice in Wonderland and Andersen's Fairy Tales, for example-—just to make you ask, "How can he call them reference books?" I'll tell you. Because I've found myself referring to them again and again through the years since boyhood, using them in the aging process as touchstones, measur- ing sticks, and lodestars. Isn't that a gooenough definition of a reference book?

I have suggested locations for these books - living room, kitchen, study or den, and bedroom. You may prefer to shelve the Modern Home Medical Adviser in the rumpus room. Some people read in the bathroom, if not actually in the tub. I don't. But I do keep a few reference books in my car, to read when tied up on the freeway.

The secret of a good reference library is to have the books always there. Lend not your books. Don't try to' compete with the public library. The paperback revolution has brought thousands of good books down to purse level. Architects, particularly of tract houses, seem to be unaware that people are buying books as never before. Although I own hundreds of paperbacks, my reference books are all in hardbound copies for the hard wear they get.

All of the 25 reference books in the following list are in print and can be bought at, or through, your local bookstore. If there isn't a bookstore in your community, you are lacking one of the hallmarks of civilization. Church, school library, park, bookstore - the essentials for cultural living.

The basic things in life are of the brain, the stomach, and the heart, and my reference books relate to all three. He who lives and reads not is no more alive than he who reads and lives not. I remember what that great public librarian, Joseph L. Wheeler, retired head of the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore, said when queried as to why he had thousands of books shelved in every room and on the stairs of his home:

"Books are cheaper than wallpaper." And who was it who said, "Books! Next to mother's milk the best food"? See item 5. Use your reference books!

Living Room

1. WEBSTER'S NEW INTERNATIONALDICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Third edition unabridged. G. C. Merriam Co. $47.50, plus $32.50 for the little wheeled truck to hold it.

Along with stove and bed, this is basic household equipment. Keep it centrally in the house, with smaller dictionaries in the other rooms.

2. THE COLUMBIA ENCYCLOPEDIAIN ONE VOLUME. Second edition with 1959 supplement. Edited by Bridgewater and Sherwood. Columbia University Press. $35.

If you haven't shelf and purse for one of the great multi-volume encyclopedias, this is the best single-volume work. When things get strained domestically, gather the family in front of the fireplace and read aloud from the encyclopedia. It soothes and distracts.

3. A DICTIONARY OF CONTEMPORARYAMERICAN USAGE. By Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans. Random House $5.95.

A witty gloss on words and phases, good and bad, which can be used as a tool by writers and as a conversation piece by readers.

4 THE READER'S ENCLYCLOPEDIA. An Encyclopedia of World Literature and the Arts. Edited by William Rose Benet. Crowell. $7.95.

Includes all manner of things, themes, people, and places, encountered in reading, with 19,008 articles on 1,270 pages. Excellent for students' homework.

5. FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS. By John Bartlett. Thirteenth and Centennial Edition. 1955. Little, Brown & Co. $10.

Who, where, when.

6. THE WORLD ALMANAC AND BOOKOF FACTS. Edited by Harry Hansen. New York World-Telegram. $2.

This famous annual originated as a newspaper office handbook. If you are addicted to quizzes and contests, chain this book to you.

7. DOCUMENTS OF AMERICAN HIS-TORY. Edited by Henry Steele Commager. Appleton-Century-Crofts. $6.50.

Here, in full, are the fundamental sources of American history, from the time of Columbus to the present, which are more read about than read.

8. HOME BOOK OF VERSE, American and English. Compiled by Burton Egbert Stevenson. Ninth edition. 2 volumes. Henry Holt & Co. $25.

First published in 1912, this massive compilation of familiar and conventional poetry is arranged in broad subject divisions such as Love and Death. I have an early single-volumeedition, given to me by my mother on my ninth birthday, and it doubles nicely as a doorstop when it's windy in my study. Companion volume is Stevenson's HOMEBOOK OF MODERN VERSE. $10. The compiler, who died last year in very old age, was librarian of the Chillicothe, Ohio, Public Library.

9. RAND McNALLY COSMOPOLITANWORLD ATLAS. Rand McNally Co. $14.95.

"I should like to rise and go where the golden apples grow," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in A Child's Garden of Verses. A good atlas is just as poetic a book. If you have traveled, it will show you where you went; if you plan to travel, it will guide you. There are many atlases; this one is excellent for its large, clear maps and its wealth of statistical and other supplementary data.

Kitchen

10. THE JOY OF COOKING. By Irma Rombauer and Marion Becker. Bobbs-Merrill. $4.95.

Flip a coin for this or FANNY FARMER, and whichever comes up, you will get one of the two best cookbooks according to lacuisine americaine. This is another book to be chained —to your wife, of course, who is already secured to stove and sink.

11. THE COOKOUT BOOK. With an ininduction to the techniques of barbecue cooking and entertaining. By Helen Evans town and Philip S. Brown. Ward Ritchie "ess. $7.50.

Imaginative and appetizing recipes for barbecuing meats, fowl, and seafoods, in a volume that was chosen by the American Institute of Graphic Arts as one of the year's most beautiful. Incidentally, the Browns agree that the best cooks are of the male sex - outdoor cooks, that is.

12. LAROUSSE GASTRONOMIQUE. THEENCYCLOPEDIA OF FOOD, WINE, ANDCOOKERY. By Prosper Montagne. Crown Publishers. $20.

The first English translation of this huge French classic. The accent is on that country, for there is no denying the French leadership in the world of food. The articles and illustrations cover everything relating to the subject, including places, plates, partridges, and parsley.

13. WINE AND SPIRITS, A Complete Buying Guide. By William E. Massee. McGraw-Hill. $8.95.

Includes all countries and their drinks, with advice on how to store and serve.

14. HORTUS SECOND. A Concise Dictionary of Gardening, General Horticulture, and Cultivated Plants in North America. Compiled by L. H. Bailey and Ethel Zoe Bailey: Macmillan. $13.50.

This is a revised and enlarged second edition of the classic American work on green growing things. If you are lucky, you will have a kitchen garden with lettuces, parsleys, herbs (and snails), and HORTUS will be your bible.

15. MODERN MEDICAL ADVISER. Edited by Morris Fishbein, M.D. Garden City Books. $4.95.

Written under Dr. Fishbein's direction by various medical authorities, this is a good book to have around just in case.

Study, Den, and Bedroom

16. ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. By Lewis Carroll. Grosset & Dunlap. $2.75.

The older one grows, the better it reads. This edition includes the original illustrations by John Tenniel. The author, whose real name was C. L. Dodgson, was a professor of mathematics who lived for 45 years in the same bachelor quarters at Christ Church, Oxford, none of which accounts for this work of genius.

17. FAIRY TALES. By Hans Christian Andersen. Grosset & Dunlap. $2.75.

Here again it's a coin flip as to whether it be Andersen or Grimm. I flipped, and the great Dane won. This edition has illustrations by Arthur Szyk.

18. ISLANDIA. By Austin T. Wright. Rinehart & Co. $5.95.

This is a long Utopian novel, written in secret by a law professor and published posthumously. Throughout the world a body of readers have organized and called themselves Islandians, sans dues or by-laws. This novel is the standard reference work by which they live.

19. THE PORTABLE EMERSON. Edited by Mark Van Doren. Viking Press. $2.95.

Though he lived and wrote a hundred years ago, he is more modern than we are, his prose seeded with time bombs, set to go off in succeeding generations. If you are timid, conservative, and a slave of the status quo, don't let this book in your house.

20. THE PORTABLE THOREAU. Edited by Carl Bode. Viking Press. $2.95.

Here is another Yankee radical who whipped progress, conformity, togetherness, and all the other dogmas which bite our heels. This too is a subversive book which should be given to the young and kept from the old.

21. THE PORTABLE MELVILLE. Edited by Jay Leyda. Viking Press. $2.95.

Includes the best of the novels, stories, poems, and letters of the great marinermystic, who won popular fame, and lost it, and won it again - posthumously. Melville was born and died in Manhattan, and that island community has yet to erect an appropriate memorial to him.

22. THE PORTABLE WHITMAN. Edited by Mark Van Doren. Viking Press. $2.95.

The good gray Quaker poet's Leaves ofGrass stays forever green through the years which wither most things. "Who touches this book, touches a man."

23. THE PORTABLE MARK TWAIN. Edited by Bernard de Voto. Viking Press. $2.95.

Includes Huckleberry Finn, that revolutionary novel which points to the ultimate reconciliation between white and black.

24. SHAKESPEARE'S COMPLETEWORKS. Edited by W.J. Craig. Oxford University Press. $4.50.

Next to the Bible, and counting out the dictionary, this is the most basic book in English. I have chosen this from among many good editions simply because I have lived with my copy for 30 years and worn it beautifully smooth.

25. THE HOLY BIBLE. King James Version. Oxford University Press. $9.75.

Choice of a Bible is a personal matter. You may prefer a modern translation. I don't. Give me the organ music of the King James. This edition is leather bound, a handy size, with concordance and index. Keep it by your bed, to be read first thing in the morning and the last thing at night.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lawrence Clark Powell is Dean of the School of Library Service at UCLA where he also holds the post of Lecturer in English. An author and editor, he writes a monthly magazine columnon Western books and authors. Among some twenty books of his own are The Alchemyof Books (1954), A Passion forBooks (1959) and Books in My Baggage (1960). If you want to know the 100 paperbacks he has selected for the library of a sophisticated family, or if you are going abroad and want his list, "Around the World in Sixty Books," send him ten cents in coin or stamps for each list. His address: School of Library Service, University of California, Los Angeles 24, California.

1962 by Editorial Projects for Education. Inc. All rights reserved.