How Products Are Made: An Illustrated Guide to Product Manufacturing (How Products Are Made) Volume 1

The text layout and the illustrations are up to Gale’s usual high standards, and organization is designed for ease of use. Each article is divided into several sections, such as background, history, raw materials, design, the manufacturing process, quality control, byproducts, the future, and where to learn more. The section on the manufacturing process is broken down into numbered steps. Each article is accompanied by one or more clear line drawings or diagrams. For some 10 percent of the articles, William S. Pretzer, a manufacturing historian and curator at the Henry Ford Museum, has contributed boxed entries on the developmental history of the product. Books and periodicals cited in the where-to-learn-more sections are up-to-date (including at least one 1994 entry) and often represent both popular and industry sources. A 15-page index includes personal names and subjects from within entries.

For many products, much of the information can be found in a general encyclopedia, though with less detail on the actual manufacturing process. Some products–golf cart, file cabinet, chewing gum, and nail polish, for instance–are unlikely to warrant entries in general encyclopedias. One inconsistency here is that an extremely complex product such as the automobile is allotted hardly anymore space than the entries for brick, chalk, or tortilla chips. This useful volume belongs on the shelves of secondary school, public, and academic libraries right next to David Macaulay’s whimsical but informative The Way Things Work.