Signs of the Times

For my first review, I picked up an interesting-looking, if old, book on international symbols: Henry Dreyfuss's Symbol Sourcebook, published by McGraw-Hill Book Company in 1972. Dreyfuss attempted here to do something that perhaps no one else had done before or has done since--to create a visual dictionary of the symbols people use in our signage around the world. Symbols are first organized by category or subject, for example: Astronomy, Travel and Accommodations, Engineering, etc. The table of contents is written out in eighteen languages. An index will help you if you need to identify the symbol for "refrigeration of cadavers" (the igloo with a lying human figure inside on page 118). Overall this index is a bit more general than I would have liked--I'm thinking of the patron who might be looking for a very specific message that is not conveyed simply by one or two words. But there are other neat little things in the book, like interesting stories about symbology. (There's a story of illiterate South African mine workers unable to read a three-part sign because they didn't know to read it from left to right. Interesting from a cultural anthropology standpoint.)

Perhaps the best part of the book is the Graphic Form Section where symbols are arranged by their dominant shapes. This is where you'd look if you saw a strange sign that had a circle and lines and you wondered what it was. You'd see all the shapes on one page that have circles and/or lines, each image directing you to where its name or message can be found in the topical section of the book.

My analysis of this book: interesting, but not ultimately as useful as I would have thought.

Don't get me wrong--there is no reference source or Internet source that compares with Dreyfuss's effort to arrange symbols from all over the world in a visual way. Where else could you find this? Still, as a colleague suggested, "If a book like this came out today it would have a whole section just on images for 'Please turn off your cell phone.'"

And that's the problem. This book is a relic, from an era when there was no Internet, when sexism and racism were more commonplace and people were less sensitive to the possible interpretations of an image, when the closest thing to animation in a sign was neon lights set to a timer, and when the kinds of messages being transmitted were different from the messages of today. That's why my final conclusion about this book is that it is valuable for historical purposes as well as some genuine reference purposes, but I have never yet and probably never will use it to answer a real patron's question.

Dewey Decimal Number: 001.56

Rating: 3Q, 0P