Editorial notes and queries

Citation

Christensen, K. (2010), "Editorial notes and queries", Reference Reviews, Vol. 24 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/rr.2010.09924haa.003

Editorial notes and queries

Article Type: Editorial notes and queries From: Reference Reviews, Volume 24, Issue 8

Karen Christen, CEO Berkshire Publishing writes:

I appreciate the review of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of China (RR 2010/195), and hope you won’t mind my writing to correct two factual errors that might mislead readers about the extent of the coverage in the five-volume work. It’s baffling that the reviewer should have said that there are no articles on food in general or on the Chinese diaspora, as we have articles on both subjects by well-known experts. E.N. Anderson, probably the world’s best-known scholar on the subject, wrote a substantial article on Cuisines, and there are articles on Tea Culture and Wine Culture, Bamboo and Tofu, and even discussion of diet therapy in the article on Traditional Medicine. The Encyclopedia has been reviewed favourably in the prominent scholarly Chinese food magazine Flavor and Fortune, and we have made plans for a substantial increase in our coverage of food culture and history in the next edition. Flavor and Fortune editor Jacqueline Newman of New York University has even suggested we publish a separate encyclopaedia on the subject, and we’re considering a trip to Hangzhou next year for the opening of the first food museum in China. The reviewer highlights another important topic, the Chinese diaspora, but again makes the mistake of saying that we do not include it, while in fact it is included and indexed under a most common scholarly term, Overseas Chinese. There are a number of related articles. We are also planning to expand the coverage in our second edition with the help of the many experts we already work with who specialize in overseas Chinese communities. As a side note, you might like to know that we published five volumes, rather than the originally planned four volumes, because our knowledge of Chinese culture grew over time and we learned that four is a very unlucky number in China because the sound of the word for four is similar to that of the word for death. Keeping the work to only five volumes was, however, a challenge, and we look forward to an expanded edition – with further content resources in the online version.

Karen ChristensenCEO, Berkshire Publishing Group, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, USA