Then and now …

… ‘You Could Look It Up’: The world before and since Wikipedia - The Washington Post. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As befits a book about fact-filled books, “You Could Look It Up” regales the reader with odd bits of information. “Legal compendia are among the foundational reference works in every civilization.” According to “The Domesday Book” — William the Conqueror’s survey of his island kingdom — England had 28,235 slaves in 1085. In his famous dictionary Samuel Johnson notoriously, and gloriously, defined the word “network” as “any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.”