Word: microprint
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...O.E.D. is a magnificent but inconvenient enthusiasm; the full 13-volume set costs $395 and weighs too much (80 Ibs.) to take on trips. A two-volume microprint edition has been available since 1971, but requires a magnifying glass to read. The eyestrain is well earned. The enterprise of the full dictionary engaged the labor of hundreds-editors, subeditors, voluntary readers-over more than half a century. The greatest of the dictionary's editors, James A.H. Murray, died in 1915, while finishing up the letter T, 13 years before the last of the Zs (zymurgy and zynder) went into...
This geometric bogey was raised last week by Connecticut Wesleyan's Librarian Fremont Rider in The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library (Hadham Press, $4.00). But Librarian Rider is not overly alarmed. He thinks the solution is already at hand, in microprint...
...Microprint, in Librarian Rider's opinion, is a better scientific substitute for oldtime methods of scratching the Lord's Prayer on a pinhead. As employed commercially by Manhattan's Readex Microprint Corp., it reduces the ordinary book page to 1/400th of its original size, prints these pages in blocks of one hundred on a 6 in. by 9 in. card. For reading, the card is inserted in a "reflectoscope" which enlarges each microprinted page to 9 in. by 12 inches. Only one page at a time appears in the reader's vision, and a mechanical finder...
Librarian Rider, a hard man to satisfy, objects to current Readex practice because the cards, like microfilm, must be boxed and stored. He would carry the process one step further, use standard card-catalogue cases, simply microprint each book on the back of its card. There would be no writing out of slips, no waiting for books to be brought from the stacks. An average library file drawer containing 2,300 cards, estimates Rider, would hold as many "books" as 168 ft. of shelves. It is already possible, he reports, to microprint 250 book pages on one side...
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