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
Like 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.



This Week's Articles

• The Complete National Geographic""

• ""Powers of Ten Interactive""

• ""Betye Saar: Digital Griot""


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.




Home | Site Index | Site Search | Forums | Archives | Marketplace

Quick News | Page One Plus | International | National/N.Y. | Business | Technology | Science | Sports | Weather | Editorial | Op-Ed | Arts | Automobiles | Books | Diversions | Job Market | Real Estate | Travel

Help/Feedback | Classifieds | Services | New York Today

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company