Soviet Going by the Book for Their Sources

Many people are well read. Then there is Alexander Danilov.

Danilov has read 24,752 books in putting together a bibliographical dictionary titled “The People of the Blue Planet,” a reference book containing 189,212 names.

By comparison, the average man reads 3,000 books in his lifetime, the Tass news agency said Wednesday.

Tass said the 60-year-old researcher began the work when he was a teen-ager, culling literary references from books, magazines and newspapers.

“The dictionary now has in it information on 189,212 personalities of all times and peoples with references to 3 million bibliographical sources,” Tass said.

Even the Great Soviet Encyclopedia has only 20,000 names in it, Tass said.

Danilov told Tass of a Leningrad professor seeking a literary reference.

“He needed some clue in the search of information about Lt. Col. Yakov Trusov of the Suzdal infantry regiment, who in the 18th Century translated Robinson Crusoe into Russian,” Danilov said. “In my dictionary, there is such a name accompanied by six bibliographical references.”

Danilov receives 5,000 letters a year from across the Soviet Union and around the world seeking obscure literary references, Tass said.