The big book on the Big Apple. (forthcoming book 'The Encyclopedia of New York City')(includes a related article on the book 'New York for New Yorkers')

Fall debut for Yale's $1-million New York City encyclopedia

YOU CAN LOVE IT or hate it, but whatever you feel about it, New York is not a boring city, and we hope that this is not a boring book. Thus--in an accent more redolent of his native Memphis than his adopted Manhattan--muses Kenneth T Jackson, the Jacques Barzun professor and chairman of the history department at Columbia University, on the 1372-page tome to which he has devoted a great part of the past eight years.

Come October, readers will be able to banish boredom and indulge passions pro and con, when Yale University Press, in conjunction with the New-York Historical Society, publishes a 25,000-copy first printing of The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Jackson with contributions from more than 650 experts. The book, with 4000-plus entries and 680 illustrations (almost half provided by the NYHS), cost just under $1 million to produce and, notes press director John Ryden, is "the single most expensive book and biggest reference work we've ever done." And yet, Yale worked hard to keep the price of the book down to $60, in order to put it within reach of the general …