The best beer in the world is brewed in Belgium. To be certified as a brewmaster in that country, one must pass a rigorous test. As part of this test, the would-be brew-master must replicate the American Budweiser. Why, one may reasonably wonder, would the brewing of the thin, pallid Budweiser be a test in a country renowned for its rich., complex ales? The reason is that the creation of a beer so characterless as Budweiser actually requires such a degree of accuracy–in, for example, getting one flavor to cancel out another–that it is indeed a test of the brewer’s craft.

One suspects that some similar process resulted in the prose of The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson and recently published, to much fanfare, by Yale University Press and the New-York Historical Society. The encyclopedia’s credits list twenty-six “project editors” and four “copy editors,” in addition to various other kinds of editors, and so it is difficult to know exactly how the line-editing chores were divvied up. What’s for sure, though, is that the words of the some 650 contributors have been thoroughly processed into a homogeneously bland pabulum. That process must have been so painstaking that one can only surmise that the editors were asked to endure some bizarre and exacting test.

Now, one does not go to a reference book of this sort in quest of sparkling prose. Such prose in such a work, rare as it is, is