Unsung icons: Reference books Recalling the trusty study aids

COMEDIAN DAVID SMIEDT TAKES AN IRREVERENT, BUT APPRECIATIVE, LOOK AT THE CLASSIC THINGS THAT DEFINE YOU-BEAUT AUSSIE LIFE

THE expansive OLD BRITANNICA WAS THE LAST WORD IN SOLID, SOLEMN reliability; A CONSTANT IN AN EVER-CHANGING WORLD

ACCORDING TO internetlivestats.com, there are about

1.2 billion live websites right now. Granted, a staggering number of those involve adorable cats and people doing things to one another that are less adorable, but it’s fair to say the sum of human knowledge has never been more accessible. Got a hankering to know the capital of Turkmenistan? Google will not only supply the answer – Ashgabat, for those playing at home – but will also show aerial shots of the CBD. And yet, somehow, we find ourselves kind of missing the printed casualties of the Information Age.

The most obvious of these is the encyclopedia. Handsomely bound, sometimes with gold accents, and alphabetically arranged – skinny K through plus-size M – they made book shelves around Australia groan like an old man after a turkey lunch. The expansive old Britannica was the last word in solid, solemn reliability. A good metre in length, it was a constant in an ever-changing world. If the Britannica or World Book said it was so, thus it was.

Yes, they dipped a toe into the digital age from the 1980s on, with CD-Roms affixed to the cover of the A. It was incredible to read about Phar Lap while viewing him in full gallop, but this only added to the fact that encyclopedias were an investment not just in family education, but also in household aesthetics. They became more burnished with age, solved a million household disputes and, with the deluxe version, you even got a yearbook that chronicled events some 18-24 months after they actually took place. And that was okay.

Encyclopedias said - in their quiet, assured way - this is a home where knowledge matters, and they were the salvation of a million school projects. Even after years, they somehow still managed to smell vaguely of acetate and whatever chemicals were used in making the faux-leather spines. Better still, they were non-fiction treasure boxes where you could chance upon a subject that happened to be next alphabetically after the one you looked up, and find a fascination you never counted on. Try that with Wiki.

Similarly, but on a grander scale, was the trusty atlas. Opened to display two pages at a time, it could cover a small coffee table. Worlds were literally arrayed before you. Fantasies of the Amazonian depths or Provence meanderings were sparked in these chrysalises of wanderlust and, if you were really lucky, the Communist countries were shaded in red. Just so everyone knew where they stood. There were few more triumphant moments than the march to, and retrieval of, the atlas when some doubting whippersnapper challenged you on the existence of a place called Reykjavik. Maybe it’s just us, but being proved right all along on a tiny screen just isn’t as satisfying.

For a geographically isolated country, the atlas also gave tangible verification of our enormous, windswept, sunburnt place in the world. Australia’s sheer bulk warranted page after glorious page, while our polysyllabic indigenous locations saw map makers furiously reducing point size and arcing typography to fit in every Mooloolaba and Watanobbi. Take that, Rome.

On a more local scale, there were few households that didn’t own one or several sun-bleached Melways or Gregory’s map books. Long before a dispassionate computer-generated voice would tell you to ‘proceed through the roundabout’, you bloody well had to figure it out yourself. It wasn’t just getting from A to B, it was several maps, each with a grid that ran A-G horizontally and 1-12 vertically. In other words, sudoku at 60 kilometres an hour, complete with optional spouse arguments when you got a street mixed up with your avenue and ended up three pages away from your intended location.

Which brings us to the Big Mac, aka the Macquarie Dictionary, the book which chronicled the way we spoke and spelled. It was the only reference book with an Australian accent, hybridised American/ English language usage and terms including ‘chookas’ for good luck, ‘bonza’ for excellent and ‘garbo’ for – well, let’s just say it has nothing to do with Greta. Naturally, it was clad in green and gold, and for word nerds who grew up to work on magazines, it generated a sense of quiet national pride every time you flipped open its pages. Better still, you didn’t have to download an update every 35 seconds.