Every book publisher today lives in the long shadow of the Internet, none more so than those of us who work on reference books. Our projects, which are usually designed to be dipped into rather than read continuously, are uniquely suited for an environment of links and search engines, yet they must compete against online content given away freely or backed by advertisers. At the same time, online publishing makes the very qualities of books once counted as virtues appear instead as limitations. The space between two covers, no matter how generous, suddenly seems unjustly arbitrary; the permanence of the printed page resists updates and rearrangements; even the physical object appears a questionable use of finite natural resources and shelf space. Reference books might well be the biggest culprits on all counts.

Such concerns were still distant on the horizon in 1999, when the University of Chicago Press began planning a reference book ultimately titled The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion. We took as our model the Oxford Companions series, which distilled such topics as English literature and the Supreme Court into one-volume encyclopedias written with students, curious citizens, and other nonspecialist readers in mind. But in taking as our subject “the child,” we sought to encompass the full range of disciplines that study children and childhood, from pediatrics to law, education to sociology, developmental psychology to anthropology. Despite the overlapping concerns of these fields with the general welfare of children, the insights they brought to bear on the subject remained segregated—not only between and within disciplines but also from parents, grandparents, teachers, and other lay professionals who find academic writing arcane and inaccessible. In the Companion, we would gather these insights into a single volume of no more than 1200 pages intended for all these audiences.

Rather than a constraint, the limitation on length represented an act of discipline critical to our objectives. As the universe of available facts and theories and perspectives expands ever outward—especially at its electronic edges—the task of sorting the central from the peripheral, the reliable from the speculative, becomes ever more overwhelming. Selection has become a contrary notion and perhaps a disappearing art, but when performed by experts, it offers readers a valuable service.

By 2005, when after years of planning and logistical hurdles we at last began approaching potential contributors, many of them seemed incredulous at the idea of covering, say, parental rights in 1250 words or adolescence in 2000. But those who accepted the challenge often found creative ways to winnow their topics. The article “Native American Children” weaves thousands of years of history into a broad comparative story, with examples drawn from various Native groups; “Cancer” focuses disproportionately on leukemias and brain tumors, which account for 50 percent of childhood diagnoses; “Body Image and Modification” treats contemporary American practices such as piercing in the context of larger global patterns. Filtered through expert lenses, each piece grounds readers in the essentials of a topic and, through further reading suggestions, refers them outward for more detail—while leaving room between the covers for our ambitious array of 570 articles.

Once the articles were completed and edited, they became fixed in space and time through the artifact of the book. As an editor, I find the spatial resistance to change more frustrating than the temporal: copyfitting text to accommodate corrections or late-breaking developments feels vaguely medieval in 2009. Curiously, though, the few such developments we encountered during the final year of production were updates to simple facts, such as the number of states that allow same-sex marriage and the title of “Senator” Barack Obama. No doubt similar small inaccuracies have crept into the book since last spring and will continue to do so over its lifespan. But the vaunted potential for “updates” in our online competitors is overrated and ambiguous: in late August, for example, I learned on Wikipedia of the existence of Ted Kennedy’s younger brother “Tommy Kennedy,” whose name linked to the article on Utah (and vanished the next day). Vetting is the best safeguard against mischief and error, and it does not come cheaply.

More important, the articles in the Companion primarily concern not simple facts but long-term trends, through syntheses of research that has occurred over many years, even decades. Such trends do not change overnight. Articles such as “Health Care Systems for Children” and “School Reform” may in a sense be outdated for ending in 2008, but any new policies the Obama Administration might implement in these areas will take years to yield new data or otherwise alter the patterns described by our contributors.

Readers can, and surely will, continue to go online for the latest news on many of the topics covered in the book, but such news often lacks context. What are parents to make of this week’s dramatic research findings on childhood obesity, or gang violence, or the effects of out-of-home child care—especially if they conflict with last week’s findings? Rarely does one study “revolutionize” our understanding of an issue, but the media doesn’t exist to tell users this undramatic fact, or to explain what the baseline understanding is. From the moment of its conception, the Companion was intended to offer just such explanations.

But what of the physical object itself, the product of ten years’ labor now brought to birth? It is 1144 pages long, a near twin to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary on my shelf. We hope readers will find it a pleasure to behold and even more of a pleasure to read, or at least dip into. From the initial point of entry, the purpose-driven reader may follow the print equivalent of links, the “see also” list, to related articles—but then again, she may find herself distracted by interesting unrelated articles as she flips to her intended destination.

So, starting from “Folk and Fairy Tales,” the reader may plan to proceed to “Myths, Childhood” until she notices the entry below for “Folklore, Children’s” and reads about the meanings of children’s jokes and ritual insult contests. Next, through the accident of alphabetical proximity, she encounters “Food Aversions and Preferences,” in which she learns that most children’s tastes bear little relationship to their parents’. In the next ten pages she discovers the benefits of foreign language education, the historical varieties of foster and kinship care, and the controversies surrounding freedom of speech. Perhaps she will eventually remember her intention to find the article on the history of Santa Claus and other childhood myths—but then again, she may not. Even in the Internet age, there is still nothing quite like getting lost in a book.

Mary E. Laur is senior project editor for reference books at the University of Chicago Press.

The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion was edited by Richard A. Shweder (William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago), Thomas R. Bidell, Anne C. Dailey, Suzanne D. Dixon, Peggy J. Miller, and John Modell.