At 09:58 AM 7/20/99 -1000, Wayne Pounds wrote:
>If this is indeed an encyclopedia rather than a
>dictionary, which i doubt, how can it's organization
>be left to the judgment of two persons (however
>brilliant).
 
I know nothing specifically about this particular volume, but I can say
that it's one of a series of such small single-author encyclopedias
published by Greenwood Press. I've contributed to the Emily Dickinson
volume (395 pp., 1998), and though I'm not the person to say so I think
it's a generally more useful book than the equally new _Emily Dickinson
Handbook_ (University of Massachusetts Press). I know I use my copy all the
time.
 
But:
 
But Greenwood Press is a niche marketer which sells almost exclusively to
university libraries, and its pricing policy seems to have been inspired by
the late Robert Maxwell. The Dickinson Encyclopedia, for instance, costs
$85 -- i.e., more than four times as much as it would cost to borrow the
book from the library and photocopy the whole thing. Now that Xerox
manufactures an automated printer that can economically produce a hardbound
book in a print run as small as 1, there's no excuse for that price. EP had
a word for it.
 
Jonathan Morse