May 13, 1999
LIBRARY / RECENT RELEASES
109 Years of a Well-Worn National Treasure
The Complete National Geographic
(National Geographic/Mindscape;
$149.95 (CD-ROM), $199.95 (DVD-ROM); Windows 3.1 and later,
Macintosh 7.5 and later.)
By LES LINE
ike
millions of Americans, I
hoarded each yellow-bordered
issue of National Geographic as
though it were an heirloom. Indeed,
when I was growing up in the late
1940's, a neighbor owned every issue
from the beginning -- 1888. Since
Playboy magazine wouldn't be invented for a few years, his son and I
spent hours thumbing through the
pages to marvel over pictures of
bare-breasted women on remote Pacific isles, among other natural wonders, of course.
So I felt guilty when, during a
move eight years ago, I dumped my
35 years of National Geographic on a
charity rummage sale. (It was that
or give up my jazz LP collection.)
And guiltier still when the magazine
commissioned me to do a story on
vanishing migratory songbirds,
sending me to Jamaica and Costa
Rica, among other places, on the
kind of expense budget I could never
have imagined.
Now that awful load of guilt has
been lifted with the arrival on my
desk of The Complete National Geographic on CD-ROM: 109 years (issues since 1888 and through 1997) on
31 disks in a slipcase (bright yellow,
of course) that would hold less than
three years of the real thing. If that's
still too much space, the
collection is available
on four DVD's.
The National Geographic Society boasts
that the collection includes every cover
(1,247), every page
(190,000), every article
(9,300), every photograph and illustration
(180,000) and every advertisement, all
scanned directly from
the original magazines.
The loose fold-out maps
are missing, gathered
in a CD-ROM package
of their own. The society's archivists, we are
told, had to turn to used-book stores, garage
sales and libraries to
find the necessary five
copies of rare issues for
scanning. In total, they
assembled 6,236 magazines that occupied 90
feet of shelf space.
Those are the gee-whiz facts of the
project, but there are other issues.
The society maintains that because
the CD-ROM archive consists of exact images of pages as they were
originally published rather than representing further editorial use, no
additional payments to writers and
photographers are necessary. This
stance has angered some of the magazine's contributors.
Nonetheless, after running the
easy installation program, I loaded
the appropriate CD and, with considerable pride, checked out my article.
After all, how many writers get a
chance to do even one piece for the
world's best-known magazine?
And the pictures look great! The
magazine's pages are displayed a
spread at a time, and the scans were
optimized to favor the photographs.
My words, however, were faint and
barely legible, even on a 17-inch monitor. But after you click on a spread
to zoom in and then maximize it to
full-screen size, you will find toolbar
buttons that darken the text (along
with the images) in three incremental steps to make it more readable.
There is also the option of printing
a spread, one page at a time, in the
exact size of the original magazine.
Using an Epson Photo 700 ink-jet
printer, I tried both glossy and flat
photo-quality paper at settings of 360,
720 and 1,400 dots per inch with consistently disappointing results: the
type was faint and badly smudged,
and the sharp photographic detail
you see on screen was lost in a smear
of pixels. Moreover, because the
CD's were created from single pages
removed from bound magazines, every spread is divided by a vertical
black stripe. Photographs that cross
over from one page to the next are
essentially split in half.
Searching the 109-year archive,
however, yields split-second results.
Entering ""South Pacific"" returned,
among other citations, a July 1948
story called ""Pacific Wards of Uncle
Sam,"" the stuff of boyhood memories
in brilliant Kodachrome colors.
But browsing is the best way to
follow the National Geographic's
evolution from a scholarly scientific
journal with a conservative, dark-brown cover and no photographs into
a legendary publication that today
reaches 50 million adults and children each month.
For example, the publication had a
longstanding policy of printing ""only
what is of a kindly nature about any
country or people."" But a browser
will notice that the policy changed in
the 1970's with the coverage of issues
like environmental problems.
Jumping from issue to issue with a
click of the mouse doesn't quite equal
the experience of flipping through
the pages of a real magazine. And
reading the stories and picture captions seriously strains the eyes, even
at the darkest type setting. But the
fast and efficient CD-ROM search
engine beats hunting through a shelf-load of magazines for a vaguely remembered article. And The Complete National Geographic reminds
us that the magazine itself, for all its
perceived and sometimes imperious
faults, is a national treasure. Even if
the yellow-bound issues sometimes
end up in a Dumpster.
Les Line is a freelance science writer, an author and a former editor in
chief of Audubon magazine.