Who’s who and what’s what

Asked to name a reference book, you may well choose the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. But perhaps you’d pick something less elephantine — the Guinness Book of World Records, with its tributes to figures such as Smudge, holder of the record for most keys removed from a keyring by a parrot, or Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which informs us that the Russian equivalent of ‘to carry coals to Newcastle’ is ‘to go to Tula with one’s own samovar’.

The American literature professor Jack Lynch has spent a large part of his life exploring the world of reference books, and in its darker corners has spotted items as recondite as Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich and Rectal Bleeding: A Medical Dictionary, Bibliography and Annotated Research Guide. The former is the brainchild of an author whose other achievements include the surely oxymoronic Astonishing Conservative Thoughts, while the publisher of the latter strays into more far-fetched territory with the claim that, ‘If your time is valuable, this book is for you.’