The full length of the Clyde

It takes an encyclopaedia to do justice to a city like Glasgow. Robert Dawson Scott reports

Guide books, almanacs, photographic anthologies, personal memoirs by favourite sons and daughters; any city worth the name has these aplenty. But an encyclopaedia devoted to a single city is something else. As far as I and the researchers at Glas gow's central Mitchell Library can tell, the recently published Glasgow Encyclopaedia is unique.

It may be that they are not anxious to find a competitor, though, for the author of this volume, Joe Fisher, was for many years the head of the Glasgow room at the Mitchell, a paradigm of a local library that reflects in the breadth of its archives the continuing fascination, not to say obsession, that Glaswegians have with their city and its past.

How does an encyclopaedia differ from any other book about a city? Mr Fisher has opted to write around 180 essays under broad headings, rather than a myriad short entries, from airport to zoo by way of burgesses, murder trials and tea-rooms.

If Glasgow folklore is worth anything, it is to the "People" section that readers will turn first. Such a wide topic requires, and is given, some subheadings, such as "Visitors and Characters". Among the former was Charles Dickens, whose comment - "A dreadful place ... though much improved and possessing a deal of public spirit" - is not so different from the picture many people still have of the city.

But among the latter, a section Mr Fisher no doubt had to ration strictly, are some gems. Who could resist Big Rachel, aka Rachel Hamilton, more than 6ft tall and variously a labourer in a shipyard, a foreman at a brickworks and a farm worker who eventually became a special constable during the Partick riots in the early 1870s; or Alexander Wyllie Petrie, known as the Clincher after the paper he started, which consisted almost exclusively of broadsides launched by himself at either the town council or police department. As a last resort, the authorities had him taken off to an asylum. But he was soon released with a certificate of his good health and thereafter, until his death in 1937, boasted of being the only Glaswegian officially declared to be sane.

The other distinguishing characteristic is that the book treats those parts that other guide books do not reach; the two ships, the Dalmarnock and the Garroch Head, carrying 2,000 tons of sewage sludge down the Clyde every day, receive as much space as the more trumpeted water system that has been bringing some of the freshest water in any city direct from Loch Katrine in the hills to the north for more than a century.

`The Glasgow Encyclopaedia', Mainstream Publishing, £20.