How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

by Mortimer J. Adler

  How to Use Reference Books

  There are many kinds of reference books. In the following section we will confine ourselves mainly to the two most used kinds, dictionaries and encyclopedias. However, many of the things we will have to say apply to other kinds of reference books as well.

  It is not always realized, yet it is nevertheless true, that a good deal of knowledge is required before you can use a reference book well. Specifically, four kinds of knowledge are required. Thus a reference book is an antidote to ignorance in only a limited way. It cannot cure total ignorance. It cannot do your thinking for you.

  To use a reference book well, you must, first, have some idea, however vague it may be, of what you want to know. Your ignorance must be like a circle of darkness surrounded by light. You want to bring light to the dark circle. You cannot do that unless light surrounds the darkness. Another way to say this is that you must be able to ask a reference book an intelligible question. It will be no help to you if you are wandering, lost, in a fog of ignorance.

  Second, you must know where to find out what you want to know. You must know what kind of question you are asking, and which kinds of reference books answer that kind of question. There is no reference book that answers all questions; all such works are specialists, as it were. Practically, this comes down to the fact that you must have a fair overall knowledge of all of the major types of reference books before you can use any one type effectively.

  There is a third, and correlative, kind of knowledge that is required before a reference book can be useful to you. You must know how the particular work is organized. It will do p. 177 you no good to know what you want to know, and to know the kind of reference book to use, if you do not know how to use the particular work. Thus there is an art of reading reference books, just as there is an art to reading anything else. There is a correlative art to making reference books, by the way. The author or compiler should know what kind of information readers will seek, and arrange his book to fit their needs. He may not always be able to anticipate these, however, which is why the rule that you should read the introduction and preface to a book before reading the book itself applies particularly here. Do not try to use a reference book before getting the editor’s advice on how to use it.

  Of course, not all kinds of questions can be answered by reference books. You will not find in any reference book the answers to the three questions that God asks the angel in Tolstoy’s story, What Men Live By—namely, “What dwells in man?” “What is not given to man?” and “What do men live by?” Nor will you find the answers to another question that is also used as the title of a Tolstoy story: “How much land does a man need?” And there are many such questions. Reference books are only useful when you know which kinds of questions can be answered by them, and which cannot. This comes down to knowing the sorts of things that men generally agree on. Only those things about which men generally and conventionally agree are to be found in reference books. Unsupported opinions have no business there, though they sometimes creep in.

  We agree that it is possible to know when a man was born, when he died, and facts about similar matters. We agree that it is possible to define words and things, and that it is possible to sketch the history of almost anything. We do not agree on moral questions or on questions about the future, and so these sorts of things are not to be found in reference books. We assume in our time that the physical world is orderable, and thus almost everything about it is to be found in reference books. This was not always so; as a result, the history of referp. 178ence books is interesting in itself, for it can tell us much about changes in men’s opinions as to what is knowable.

  As you can see, we have just been suggesting that there is a fourth requirement for the intelligent use of reference books. You must know what you want to know; you must know in what reference work to find it; you must know how to find it in the reference work; and you must know that it is considered knowable by the authors or compilers of the book. All this indicates that you must know a good deal before you can use a work of reference. Reference books are useless to people who know nothing. They are not guides to the perplexed.

  How to Use a Dictionary

  As a reference book, the dictionary is subject to all the considerations outlined above. But the dictionary also invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment. There are worse ways to kill time.

  Dictionaries are full of arcane knowledge and witty oddments. Over and above that, of course, they have their more sober employments. To make the most of these, one has to know how to read the special kind of book a dictionary is.

  Santayana’s remark about the Greeks—that they were the only uneducated people in European history—has a double significance. The masses were, of course, uneducated, but even the learned few—the leisure class—were not educated in the sense that they had to sit at the feet of foreign masters. Education, in that sense, begins with the Romans, who went to school to Greek pedagogues, and became cultivated through contact with the Greek culture they had conquered.

  It is not surprising, therefore, that the first dictionaries were glossaries of Homeric words, intended to help Romans read the Iliad and Odyssey as well as other Greek literature employing the “archaic” Homeric vocabulary. In the same p. 179 way, many of us today need a glossary to read Shakespeare, or if not Shakespeare, Chaucer.

  There were dictionaries in the Middle Ages, but they were usually encyclopedias of worldly knowledge comprised of discussions of the most important technical terms employed in learned discourse. There were foreign-language dictionaries in the Renaissance (both Greek and Latin), made necessary by the fact that the works that dominated the education of the period were in the ancient languages. Even when the so-called vulgar tongues—Italian, French, English—gradually replaced Latin as the language of learning, the pursuit of learning was still the privilege of the few. Under such circumstances, dictionaries were intended for a limited audience, mainly as an aid to reading and writing worthy literature.

  Thus we see that from the beginning the educational motive dominated the making of dictionaries, although there was also an interest in preserving the purity and order of the language. As contrasted with the latter purpose, the Oxford English Dictionary (known familiarly as the OED), begun in 1857, was a new departure, in that it did not try to dictate usage but instead to present an accurate historical record of every type of usage—the worst as well as the best, taken from popular as well as elegant writing. But this conflict between the lexicographer as self-appointed arbiter and the lexicographer as historian can be regarded as a side-issue, for the dictionary, however constructed, is primarily an educational instrument.

  This fact is relevant to the rules for using a dictionary well, as an extrinsic aid to reading. The first rule of reading any book is to know what kind of book it is. That means knowing what the author’s intention was and what sort of thing you can expect to find in his work. If you look upon a dictionary merely as a spelling book or guide to pronunciation, you will use it accordingly, which is to say not well. If you realize that it contains a wealth of historical information, crystallized in the growth and development of language, you will pay attenp. 180tion, not merely to the variety of meanings listed under each word, but also to their order and relation.

  Above all, if you are interested in advancing your own education, you will use a dictionary according to its primary intention—as a help in reading books that might otherwise be too difficult because their vocabulary includes technical words, archaic words, literary allusions, or even familiar words used in obsolete senses.

  Of course, there are many problems to be solved in reading a book well other than those arising from an author’s vocabulary. And we have warned against—particularly on the first reading of a difficult book—sitting with the book in one hand and the dictionary in the other. If you have to look up too many words at the beginning, you will certainly lose track of the book’s unity and
order. The dictionary’s primary service is on those occasions when you are confronted with a technical word or with a word that is wholly new to you. Even then, we would not recommend looking up even these during your first reading of a good book unless they seem to be important to the author’s general meaning.

  This suggests several other negative injunctions. There is no more irritating fellow than the one who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or freedom, by quoting from the dictionary. Lexicographers may be respected as authorities on word usage, but they are not the ultimate founts of wisdom. Another negative rule is: Don’t swallow the dictionary. Don’t try to get word-rich quick by memorizing a fancy list of words whose meanings are unconnected with any actual experience. In short, do not forget that the dictionary is a book about words, not about things.

  If we remember this, we can derive from that fact all the rules for using a dictionary intelligently. Words can be looked at in four ways.

  1. WORDS ARE PHYSICAL THINGS—writable words and speakable sounds. There must, therefore, be uniform ways of spellp. 181ing and pronouncing them, though the uniformity is often spoiled by variations, and in any event is not as eternally important as some of your teachers may have indicated.

  2. WORDS ARE PARTS OF SPEECH. Each single word plays a grammatical role in the more complicated structure of a phrase or sentence. The same word can vary in different usages, shifting from one part of speech to another, especially in a non-inflected language like English.

  3. WORDS ARE SIGNS. They have meanings, not one but many. These meanings are related in various ways. Sometimes they shade from one into another; sometimes a word will have two or more sets of totally unrelated meanings. Through their meanings, different words are related to one another—as synonyms sharing in the same meaning even though they differ in shading; or as antonyms through opposition or contrast of meanings. Furthermore, it is in their capacity as signs that we distinguish words as proper or common names (according as they name just one thing or many that are alike in some respect); and as concrete or abstract names (according as they point to something we can sense, or refer to some aspect of things that we can understand by thought but not observe through our senses).

  4. Finally, WORDS ARE CONVENTIONAL. They are man-made signs. That is why every word has a history, a cultural career in the course of which it goes through certain transformations. The history of words is given by their etymological derivation from original word-roots, prefixes, and suffixes; it includes the account of their physical changes, both in spelling and pronunciation; it tells of the shifting meanings, and which among them are archaic and obsolete, which are current and regular, which are idiomatic, colloquial, or slang.

  A good dictionary will answer all of these four different kinds of questions about words. The art of using a dictionary p. 182 consists in knowing what questions to ask about words and how to find the answers. We have suggested the questions. The dictionary itself tells you how to find the answers.

  As such, it is a perfect self-help book, because it tells you what to pay attention to and how to interpret the various abbreviations and symbols it uses in giving you the four varieties of information about words. Anyone who fails to consult the explanatory notes and the list of abbreviations at the beginning of a dictionary has only himself to blame if he is not able to use it well.

  How to Use an Encyclopedia

  Many of the things we have said about dictionaries apply to encyclopedias also. Like the dictionary, the encyclopedia invites a playful reading. It too is diverting, entertaining, and, for some people, soothing. But it is just as vain to try to read an encyclopedia through as a dictionary. The man who knew an encyclopedia by heart would be in grave danger of incurring the title idiot savant—“learned fool.”

  Many people use a dictionary to find out how to spell and pronounce words. The analogous employment of an encyclopedia is to use it only to look up dates and places and other such simple facts. But this is to under-use, or misuse, an encyclopedia. Like dictionaries, such works are educational as well as informational tools. A glance at their history will confirm this.

  Though the word “encyclopedia” is Greek, the Greeks had no encyclopedia, and for the same reason that they had no dictionary. The word meant to them not a book about knowledge, a book in which knowledge reposed, but knowledge itself—all the knowledge that an educated man should have. It was again the Romans who first found encyclopedias necessary; the oldest extant example is that of Pliny.

  Interestingly enough, the first alphabetically-arranged enp. 183cyclopedia did not appear until about 1700. Most of the great encyclopedias since then have been alphabetical. It is the easiest of all arrangements, and it made possible great strides in encyclopedia-making.

  Encyclopedias present a different problem from wordbooks. An alphabetical arrangement is natural for a dictionary. But is the world, which is the subject matter of an encyclopedia, arranged alphabetically? Obviously not. Well then, how is the world arranged and ordered? This comes down to asking how knowledge is ordered.

  The ordering of knowledge has changed with the centuries. All knowledge was once ordered in relation to the seven liberal arts—grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the trivium; arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, the quadrivium. Medieval encyclopedias reflected this arrangement. Since the universities were arranged according to the same system, and students studied according to it also, the arrangement was useful in education.

  The modern university is very different from the medieval one, and the change is reflected in modern encyclopedias. The knowledge that they report is divided up in fiefs, or specialties, that are roughly equivalent to the various departments of the university. But this arrangement, although it forms the backbone structure of an encyclopedia, is masked by the alphabetical arrangement of the material.

  It is this infra-structure—to take a term from the sociologists—that the good reader and user of an encyclopedia will seek to discover. It is true that it is primarily factual information that he wants from his set. But he should not be content with facts in isolation. The encyclopedia presents him with an arrangement of facts—facts in relation to other facts. The understanding, as contrasted with the mere information, that an encylopedia can provide depends on the recognition of such relations.

  In an alphabetically-arranged encyclopedia, these relations are to a large extent obscured. In a topically-arranged encyclop. 184pedia, they are, of course, highlighted. But topical encyclopedias have many disadvantages, among them the fact that most readers are not accustomed to using them. Ideally, the best encyclopedia would be one that had both a topical and an alphabetical arrangement. Its presentation of material in the form of separate articles would be alphabetical, but it would also contain some kind of topical key or outline—essentially, a table of contents. (A table of contents is a topical arrangement of a book, as opposed to an index, which is an alphabetical arrangement.) As far as we know, there is no such encyclopedia on the market today, but it would be worth the effort to try to make one.

  In default of the ideal, the reader must fall back on the help and advice provided him by an encyclopedia’s editors. Any good encyclopedia includes directions about how to use it effectively, and these should be read and followed. Often, these directions require that the user go first to the set’s index, before turning to one of the alphabetically-arranged volumes. Here, the index is serving the function of a table of contents, though not very well; for it gathers together, under one heading, references to discussions in the encyclopedia that may be widely separated in space but that are nevertheless about the same general subject. This reflects the fact that although an index is of course alphabetically arranged, its so-called analyticals—that is, the breakdowns under a main entry—are topically arranged. But the topics themselves must be in alphabetical order, which is not necessarily the best arrangement. Thus the index of a really good encyclopedia such as Britannica goes part of the way toward revealing the ar
rangement of knowledge that the work reflects. For this reason, any reader who fails to use the index has only himself to blame if the work does not serve his needs.

  There are negative injunctions associated with the use of encyclopedias, just as there are for dictionaries. Encyclopedias, like dictionaries, are valuable adjuncts to the reading of good books—bad books do not ordinarily require their presence; but, p. 185 as before, it is wise not to enslave yourself to an encyclopedia. Again, as with dictionaries, encyclopedias are not to be used for the settling of arguments where these are based on differences of opinion. Nevertheless, they should be used to end disputes about matters of fact as quickly and permanently as possible. Facts should never be argued about in the first place. An encyclopedia makes this vain effort unnecessary, because encyclopedias are full of facts. Ideally, they are filled with nothing else. Finally, although dictionaries usually agree in their accounts of words, encyclopedias often do not agree in their accounts of facts. Hence, if you are really interested in a subject and are depending on encyclopedic treatments of it, do not restrict yourself to just one encylopedia. Read more than one, and preferably ones written at different times.

  We noted several points about words that the user should keep in mind when he consults a dictionary. In the case of encyclopedias, the analogous points are about facts, for an encyclopedia is about facts as a dictionary is about words.

  1. FACTS ARE PROPOSITIONS. Statements of fact employ words in combination, such as “Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809,” or “the atomic number of gold is 79.” Facts are not physical things, as words are, but they do require to be explained. For thorough knowledge, for understanding, you must also know what the significance of a fact is—how it affects the truth you are seeking. You do not know much if all you know is what the fact is.