Telescope Reviews: After Messier

I'm glad bper brought up that "Phoenix Times" bio of Burnham because it shows the troubles an author is likely to have finding a publisher for that kind of project--whether a comprehensive Burnham-type deep-sky guide, or "just" an update of the Celestial Handbook. The up-front production costs are going to be very high, especially if the photos are printed in better paper: so, no matter how popular and successful the BCH has been, publishers are going to be shy about taking on such a project.

One of the ironies in the of Burnham's story is that one of the publishers he approached turned down the BCH because they claimed they would have to double-check all his data and that would take two years. Also according to the bio, Lowell Observatory itself was worried about errors in their employee's book--though that may well have been from the jealousy of Burnham at Lowell to which the article alludes. But publishers and magazines are certainly not so fastidious about errors in fact or typology today! In a well-written and forceful review of "Star Clusters and How to Observe Them", CN's Don Pensack roundly criticizes the book's author and publisher for their slip-shod editing, leaving even spelling and gramatical errors. Unfortunately that book is not unique: I even see a lot more typos in the technical journals the last few years. Worse, in one book after another, and year after year in the magazines, the SAME errors are repeated ad nauseum about constellation history. Just one example: A recent article in one of the magazines claimed that the zodiac was formed long before 400 BC--something serious scholars stopped believing before the First World War. (Many of its individual constellations are much older, but the zodiac as such was invented around 500 BC in Babylon.)

Thus we can assume that there are few publishers today who would want to spend the money to make a new BCH as scientifically and topographically accurate as Robert Burnham, Jr. made his BCH. Thus I'm afraid that to a certain extent while reading astronomy books and articles we already are in the situation Paul R described above: " . . . forever wondering, 'Gee, is this part correct?' "

As the "Phoenix New Times" article says, there were serious difficulties between Burnham and Dover Publications and Dover stonewalled the reporter. Any author who would contemplate a Celestial Handbook type project would probably want to find out what those problems were. My impressions after reading the bio (which I first did several years ago) was that Robert Burnham Jr. was one of these people too good for this life. From a practical point of view his weakness was that he was not "diversified" as a thinker and writer--But that kind of focus is probably what it takes to write a BCH. He gave us a wonderful gift--but got darned little pleasure out of it.

Craig Crossen