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From stone tools to the space race, Routledge’s paperback An Encyclopedia of
the History of Technology (£30, ISBN 0 415 1479 2, edited by Ian McNeil)
offers a guide from Egyptian methods of chicken rearing to the development of
locks, both door and canal. Its form is the fact-packed essay, rather than the
short paragraph of definition, so it may prove a distracting read rather than a
rapid reference book.