RR 2008/288 Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained

摘要

Despite the popularity of astrology, UFOs, psychic phenomena, witchcraft, and other such strange and dubious phenomena, librarians have been rather coy about indulging this popularity. In the 1970s, when John Allegro's book The Magic Mushroom and the Church (1970) and Alex Sander's King of the Witches (1969) hit the bestseller headlines, yours truly, being a young idealist librarian, put on a display of material to provide some objectivity and common sense on the subject. Silly me! The howls of the righteous thus provoked taught me to avoid all controversy ever since! Thirty years later, when I and my co-compilers used the heading The Unexplained in the first edition of Facets's Know It All; Find It Fast (2002), so many librarian-reviewers ridiculed it that we took it out for our second edition two years later. Wrongly, I believe. So our decision to reinstate it for the upcoming third edition receives a welcome boost with the publication of Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained. What is it about this reticence of public libraries? Do we still harbour a latent puritanism? Is it a predudice against "pseudo-science", or just a fear of complaints to councillors and line-managers?