Fantastic Victoriana!
Another one of my very most favorite reference books is this beauty:
You can browse the author index and table of contents for this one on the publisher's website: Monkey Brain Books
Reference books like this one are essential for navigating a collection as large as Fales. For instance, the article on "Future War" pointed me to the entry on "Jack O'Halloran" which led me to this book:
A Modern Daedalus (1887) by Tom Greer. In the novel Jack O'Halloran, a patriotic Irishman, invents wings that enable him to fly. He is soon caught up in an Irish uprising against the English and trains a group of fliers to use his invention to bombard the British.
I had never heard of this author or title before, but there it was on the shelf in Fales.
The entry on "The Yellow Peril" was very informative about this title:
The Yellow Danger (1898) by M. P. Shiel. In this instance, I knew of the book -- I had read a couple of Shiel's short stories and investigated the holdings in Fales. The encyclopedia article on "The Yellow Peril" placed this title within the broader context of Victorian fiction based on Asian stereotypes. Shiel's character, Doctor Yen How, is the first instance of an Asian threat that is military rather than magical or fantastic. As the encyclopedia points out "he reflects the Western fear of the 'limitless hordes' of Chinese overrunning the white countries of the west." (p. 981) The article also identifies several other titles on this theme, many of which are in Fales.
As much as I love all the online reference books -- check out Oxford Reference Online for a heap of great reference books -- there's still much to be said for sitting down and flipping through the pages of a book like The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana.
Regardless of how you browse your reference books, they can be an excellent means of identifying items that are likely to be on the shelves in Fales.