September 30, 2025 · Levine House Press
A short defence of the desk reference
Search is excellent at answering the question you already know how to ask.
The argument against reference books is that everything in them is online. This is true and beside the point.
A search engine answers the question you already know how to ask. A reference book, left open on a desk, answers the question next to it — the one you did not know existed until your eye landed on the facing page.
That adjacency is the whole product. It is why The Atlas of Ordinary Weather puts every cloud genus on facing plates instead of alphabetising them, and why we will keep making books that are worse than search at retrieval and better than search at noticing.
editorial · reference