Race of the Gazetteers

About the rarest of current reference books is a gazetteer--the vast descriptive index of towns, cities, counties, countries, mountains, valleys and rivers all over the world. Not since the Lippincott volume of 1905 has the U.S. had a really comprehensive one, and the information in that is obviously long out of date. Last week the Columbia University Press announced that it has something new at last. For $50, curiosos can now get the fattest U.S. compilation ever--the Columbia Lippincott Gazetteer of the World.

It has taken almost six years and $400,000-plus to put it together. Under Editor Leon E. Seltzer, 150 scholars worked in 55 different languages, collecting the latest facts & figures about 130,000 different places. But the job of making a gazetteer, they learned, is more than just collecting. It also involves disentangling a baffling mishmash of world statistics.

Here Today . . . Standard atlases do not even agree on heights of some of the Alpine peaks. Some governments like to pad their population figures; some cities boast a bewildering array of spellings--e.g., Jebeil, Jubeil, Jebail, Jubayl, Jbail Djebail, Djoubeil. In Russia, a city's name is apt to change with the size of its population; in China, it can change with the seasonal movement of a district capital (e.g., Shanmulung officially becomes Lungchwan in the winter; Changfengkai becomes Lungchwan in the summer). Islands present a special problem: the South Pacific's volcanic Fonuafoo, for instance, emerged in 1885, disappeared in 1894, reappeared in 1927, sank in 1949, will probably come up again soon.

To get their figures straight, Seltzer's gazetteers had to explore far beyond the stacks of the major U.S. libraries. They pored over government manuals, foreign industrial reports, newspapers, schoolbooks and road maps. They wrote to mayors, postmasters, and even to the Dalai Lama. They wrote to every provincial government in China. By the time the Reds took over, most of the replies were in--the most complete collection of data on China available to date.

Gone Tomorrow . . . As the news of their work spread, they got help from unexpected sources. An Indian maharaja sent them scores of volumes about his own state. The Finnish Foreign Minister ordered an official geographer to help them, and Iran's late Premier Ali Razmara sent them a special survey he had made for the Iranian army. Some countries were not so cooperative, but the gazetteers managed nonetheless. By looking through a recent propaganda tract from Argentina, they found some of the 1947 population figures that Peron had suppressed. By combing through Soviet schoolbooks they learned a thing or two about Russia. Example: the village of Tyuya-Muyun has disappeared from maps, because it has become a uranium-mining center.

For five years the gazetteers explored everything from ocean currents to ghost towns, from dam sites and battle sites to the sites of ancient ruins. But their race with a changing world had to keep on right up to the last. When the book was in galleys, an expedition discovered the highest peak of the Drakensberg range in South Africa; when the book was in page proof, another expedition "discovered" the headwaters of the Orinoco (TIME, Dec. 24). After that, the gazetteers began to lose out. Mt. Etna suddenly changed its height by erupting, and a British oceanographer located the deepest spot in the Pacific--both too late to make the final deadline.

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