Knock Twice

About ten years before he died, my brothers and I gave our Grandfather Henry The Macmillan Visual Dictionary as a gift. For Henry, a dyslexic high-school school dropout who supported a family of eight working construction and contracting*, this book was a great fun. Using “3,500 color illustrations,” covering “600 subjects,” with “25,000 terms”, the Visual Dictionary defined words with pictures.  Perhaps more useful for kids than for a man of Henry’s age, the book was a hit with family members of all ages.

Now that Henry is dead, I keep the book in my office and on my desk at work. Everyday I spend just a few minutes perusing its  862 pages, and every time I find myself excited by both the simplicity of the book’s design and by the breadth of its coverage. Though the illustrations are a little dated, they cover everything from animal to vegetable, from sports to underwear, and from transportation, to buildings, to gadgets of all stripes.

Sure the images look a little simple in a post-Tufte world, but I think that on a fundamental level, as the Macmillan Visual Dictionary has become outdated, we now occupy a time and place where the Internet can and should be used to present numerous and interactive ways to understand the information that pervades our life.

*This is how my mother describes her father’s work: mechanical engineer - fancy name for handy man, fix it up guy, carpenter, plumber, electrician.

Check below the fold if you are interested in building a tennis court.