Internet Archaeology (Nov 1999)
Review of A Compendium of Pevsner's Buildings of England [CD=-ROM]
Abstract
Misleading titles might seem a good idea to the marketing department of a publishing house but by raising expectations that cannot be fulfilled they run the risk of concealing the real merits of a publication. Thus this very useful CD was launched in 1995 by Oxford University Press at an extraordinarily high price under the guise of providing something very much more comprehensive than it could deliver. Not surprisingly, it failed to sell in sufficient numbers and was dropped from the publisher's list but thankfully it has been rescued by the enterprising compiler and the remaining copies are available directly from him at less than a third of the original price. For the serious student of above-ground archaeology in its widest meaning, it is well worth purchasing at the new price provided that its limitations are recognised at the outset. It is not a compendium in any meaningful sense of that word. At the very least, that would suggest elements of the text and some of the plans and photographs and it contains none of these. Quite simply, it is a text-only index to the Buildings of England and I calculate that if it had been available thirty years ago when I was embarking on my doctoral dissertation it would have saved me something like a year of research time. It is not a substitute for the text of the series, whose strengths and weaknesses are well enough known not to need rehearsing here, but it is the key to unlocking the vast amount of information that is contained in each volume and ordering that information into patterns that are both useful and illuminating.
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