When I ask the Biscuit to hold my messenger bag for a second so I can re-layer my clothing or whatever, he often makes a big show of staggering underneath its weight. I usually greet said show by rolling my eyes and muttering, “Ohhhh, pobrecito,” but he has a point. I could pack a lot lighter, but I like to feel prepared, so I bring a lot of crap around with me: my mini-Filofax; something to read; pens and pencils and paper of various sizes; extra books of matches, should my lighter quit at an inconvenient time; a street map; Kleenex; earplugs; and my “field-medicine kit,” a smaller bag-within-the-bag that contains Band-Aids, painkillers, a nail clipper, make-up, an inhaler, condoms and my birth-control pills (I can prevent pregnancy anywhere, anytime), tampons (see, I told you). My friends used to tease me about all this crap, but then one by one they got blisters or had headaches or needed to write something down, and they learned to respect my near-pathological preparedness.

I’ve adopted the same attitude towards reference books, namely that it can’t hurt to stockpile them even if they seem irrelevant, because you just never know. Yeah, I could look most things up on the Internet, but a lot of times, it takes longer, and besides, I like the sober heft of a reference book; somehow, books just seem more authoritative.

Below, a list of the reference tomes currently bowing my poor shelves beneath their weight. By compiling a similar list, you too can become a precociously over-informed dilettante o’ general knowledge just like me, able to breeze through the most arcane Jeopardy! clues with a condescending sniff, yet stumped by categories such as “State Capitols” and “Information Which Might One Day Prove The Least Bit Useful.”

On The Desk

1. Total Television, by Alex McNeil. I’ve used this to settle disputes several times; it also helps jog the memory during particularly difficult TV-based rounds of “Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon.” (Hint: use that silly little mid-eighties show about the twins who move to the big city, “Double Trouble.” Nobody ever thinks of that one, but Barbara Barrie will take you far.)

2. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. I should probably just give in to blissful pedantry and get the Oxford English Dictionary, the one that comes with a little viewing stand and a winch, but for now, “the 9C” does quite nicely. I also have the 10C, but the 10C doesn’t have as good a biographical section.

Beside The Desk

1. Various permutations of Writer’s Market, including Poet’s Market and Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market. Exactly one of these so-called markets has ever panned out for me, and the job gave me an ulcer in under a year.

2. Latin/English and Spanish/English dictionaries. The Spanish/English I don’t use very often, except when Ernie and I have dug ourselves so deeply into The Ditch Of Craven Procrastination that we spend hours on the phone together, looking for ways to say “whatever” and “not” in foreign languages. The Latin/English I reserve for occasions on which someone has incorrectly identified the plural of “Elvis” as “Elvi.” If you want to win yourself a quick twenty bucks, go into a bar and bet a total stranger that he/she doesn’t know the correct plural form of “Elvis”; you’ll almost certainly win (it’s “Elves,” pronounced the same way as the “Elwes” in “Cary Elwes”). Offer to go double or nothing on “penis” (again, not “peni” but “penes”). I’ve never tried this myself, because I don’t want to get beaten up for behaving like a pretentious little snot, but if you can acquit yourself in a fistfight, go for it.

3. The Larousse Dictionary Of Writers. I think the writers of Behind The Music must pass around a dog-eared copy of the Larousse, because a whole lot of the entries use the construction “descent into alcohol and drugs.” Well, okay, “descent into mead and opium.” Close enough.

4. The Princeton University “freshman face-book.” Good for strolls down memory lane, and also for looking up the guys with wedding bulletins in the alumni mag and laughing at how little of their freshman hair they have left.

5. A Dictionary Of Superstitions, by Opie & Tatem.

6. Three different crossword-puzzle dictionaries. I don’t even do the daily crossword anymore, but I find these easier to use than Roget’s. Plus, I’ve had to come up with umpteen different ways to call Jen Lindley “Pig Face,” ways that Wing Chun hasn’t used already, and I never would have thought of cuchifrito if not for my trusty Times crossword dic.

7. Many, many more Norton Anthologies than one woman needs.

8. Writer’s Digest Writer’s Encyclopedia. I like their handy table of proofreading marks. As it turned out, the Penthouse editors couldn’t have cared much less. Oh, well.

9. Oxford’s Dictionary Of Modern American Usage. I actually read parts of this straight through, because I am an inveterate quibbler, not to mention deeply weird, even for an English major. My mother, possibly the only person on earth who genuinely empathizes with my grammatical pettifogging, gave me the book for Christmas last year. Thanks, Ma.

10. Copspeak, by Tom Philbin. It doesn’t contain anything I couldn’t have learned from Law & Order reruns – except, I guess, still more proof that the average police officer is not terribly bright. Or modest. Or able to make nouns and verbs agree.

11. Signed English: A Basic Guide, by Harry Bornstein and Karen L. Saulnier. So basic, in fact, that I’ve already forgotten everything I taught myself except the sign for “boy.” Go figure. I don’t know why I bought the book to begin with – I don’t even know any hearing-impaired people – but for some reason I can’t bring myself to pitch it.

12. On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. Required reading for students and writers. I reread it once a year just to keep myself honest, and I have to admit that I cringe when I approach the selections by E.B. White, because White can still write circles around me, and he died a while ago.

13. Tuttle Dictionary Of First Names, by Julia Cresswell. It’s a British book, so Cresswell defines a lot of Celtic and Welsh names, and I flip through it and wish my parents had named me something silvery like “Rhonwen,” and then I think about how many times I would have to spell my name out loud to people (“no, no, ëR-H’ – no, ëH’ – see, there’s an ëH’ after the ëR’”) and I get over it.

14. The Bible.

15. The Timetables Of History, by Bernard Grun. Werner Stein put together a similar compendium called Kulturfahrplan; basically, it breaks down major political and cultural developments by year, from the beginning of recorded time to 1990.

16. The second edition of Total Baseball.

17. Choose The Right Word, by S.I. Hayakawa. Anyone sensing a theme here? For wordies like myself, a book like this – which goes on and on at windy length about the difference between “evade” and “elude” – is heaven on earth.

18. The Prentice Hall Guide To English Literature. Perfect for when I know what a literary term or trend means, but I can’t explain it, and I have to look it up.

19. A rhyming dictionary, from when I used to write poetry.

20. 2107 Curious Word Origins, Sayings & Expressions, by Charles Earle Funk. It’s dated – it originally appeared as four different volumes, with publication dates starting in 1948 – but sometimes useful for the times when I wonder where, say, the expression “three sheets to/in the wind” comes from (if anyone cares, when all three of a longship’s sails come unmoored, the ship pitches and reels on the waves – thus, the phrase’s meaning of “very drunk”).

21. The Chicago Manual Of Style. Speak to me not of the MLA.

Littered Around The Apartment

1. Cosmopolitan Bedside Astrologer Companion: Aries. Not proud of that one, no sirree.

2. The F Word, ed. Jesse Sheidlower. It sounds like a good gag gift, and that’s about all it’s good for, really; I didn’t find anything in there I hadn’t already made up myself.

3. The Films Of The Eighties, by Douglas Brode. I fervently hope that Mr. Brode has acquired something resembling a spell-check program since this book came out, because his already-stinky writing is riddled with typographical errors. Good pictures, though.

4. Stedman’s Medical Dictionary. I should have gotten rid of it long ago, because I keep diagnosing myself with things like sepsis, but now that I write about ER, I actually find it useful.

5. All the free books Consumer Reports throws in as bribes for your subscription. Frankly, I only ordered the magazine so that I could get my little mitts on “How To Clean Practically Anything,” and I don’t regret it. The editors, to their credit, confront the seamy underbelly of the stain world without flinching, and thanks to their courage (and the nifty stain/textile flow chart in the back of the book), I now know how to get cat barf out of every goddamn fabric known to man. And I’ve used that knowledge. All of it. Hey, that reminds me – anyone want to adopt a cat? Just kidding.

6. The Complete Cat Book, by Richard H. Gerhardt. Adopt the cat, get the book – AB-so-LUTE-ly FREE! Heh, just kidding again. I didn’t get much out of Gerhardt’s oversized paperback, except the names of all the different tabby patterns, which I memorized, subsequently forcing a useful tidbit of information out of my brain forever. But “ginger-point broken mackerel” sounds cooler than “orange tabby.” Okay, it doesn’t, but I spent fourteen bucks on that damn book, and did I find a single mention of Petromalt therein? No, I did not.

7. Three or four books on herbalism that I borrowed from a friend about six years ago so that I could write an article, then subsequently forgot to return, and I don’t even know where the friend lives now, so I guess they belong to me. I should bust those out and read up on the herbs, but I keep forgetting to do that too. Gee, guess I’ll start with the ginkgo biloba page if I ever get around to it.

8. The Encyclopedia Of Ghosts And Spirits, by Rosemary Ellen Guiley. The author writes quite well, and not a few of the entries give me shivers just to read them; the text is interspersed with spooky woodcuts of the type that used to adorn Joan Aiken novels. I could do without a lot of the passages on defrocked psychics, and it doesn’t have anything about the Jersey Devil (for shame!), but I never get tired of reading about the wendigo.

9. The Giant Book Of Insults, compiled by Louis A. Safian. Ernie picked this one up at The Strand for one dollar. To this day, we think she paid too much. Pre-verbal infants can come up with better comebacks than these; the phone book is a wittier read (and shorter). Let me open up the book at random to find an example – ah, yes, here’s one from the “Playboys” chapter: “He’s in his second Brigitte Bardotage.” Um, okay. How about this one, from the “Figures” section: “On account of his unrestrainable appetite, everyone is having fun at his expanse.” “Expanse” – geddit? Or, to put it another way, “[Clunk.]” In the introduction, Mr. Safian announces with great authority that “[t]he secret of the success of the epigram is found in its definition – a grain of truth in the twinkling of an eye.” Well, yes, but it helps if said epigram is well-written. The phrase “Kathie Lee Gifford bites the big one” is both truthful and terse, but I don’t think you’ll hear it quoted in a commencement speech this spring. “The Family Circus” is funnier than Mr. Safian’s so-called “drollery.” I’d give this book away, but I wouldn’t want to inflict it on anyone else.

Well, here ends the Tomato Nation reference library. Stay tuned for parts three and four.

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