Fall Reference Preview Preview
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
Reference Books Bulletin‘s annual Fall Reference Preview comes out soon in the August issue of Booklist. A quick survey of past Fall Reference Preview is a good indication of how reference publishing has changed over the years. We took a look back at the first FRP, published in 1998, and saw many familiar names that have since been absorbed by other companies, or completely disappeared. Fitzroy Dearborn? Oryx? St. James? Gone. Groves is now part of Oxford, Routledge is part of Taylor & Francis, CQ is part of Sage. Since last year’s preview, Greenwood has become part of ABC-CLIO. The distinguished Scribner and Macmillan names live on as imprints of Gale–barely. As it acquired more companies, Gale would send us reams of paper representing new fall reference books from all of their various imprints. This year they sent one. Not one imprint, not even one page. One title, a four-volume Encyclopedia of Modern China, which follows by a few months the five-volume Encyclopedia of China from Berkshire Publishing.
There are a number of items listed in the Fall Reference Preview that I’m looking forward to seeing. Oxford is coming out with a two-volume Oxford Companion to Architecture in September, and the seventh edition of the standard Oxford Dictionary of Quotations in October. We can expect new editions of the six-volume Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History and Facts On File’s eleven-volume Encyclopedia of American History. A six-volume Encyclopedia of Journalism is coming from Sage. Greenwood is publishing a five-volume Shakespeare Encyclopedia: Life, Works, World, and Legacy, not to be confused with the one-volume Shakespeare Encyclopedia: The Complete Guide to the Man and His Works from DK. Sharpe’s three-volume Booms and Busts: An Encyclopedia of Economic History from Tulipmania of the 1630s to the Global Financial Crisis of the 21st Century is certainly timely. Clearly, though, the real action is on the digital publishing side. A few years ago we took information about new databases out of the Fall Reference Preview and moved it to our Spring and Fall Database Updates issues, and those updates have grown so much that this year we’re presenting each of them them in two parts. The upcoming Fall Database Update will appear in the November 1 and 15 issues of Booklist.
Will libraries that buy any new reference books or multivolume sets this fall find they just sit on the shelves? That’s pretty much what I heard at the “Rethinking the Reference Collection” program presented by Reference Books Bulletin at the recent ALA Annual Conference. I wonder how long it will be before our Fall Reference Preview goes the way of so many reference publishers.
