I was educated in days long before the PC; as a consequence I have a great respect for reference works and do not agree with some of my younger acquaintances who claim that everything is available on the internet. This may be true but it does not negate the usefulness of having relevant reference works to hand. As a consequence I cannot speak too highly of the ‘‘Handbook of Chemistry and Physics’’ published annually by CRC Press and think a copy should be on every chemist’s bookshelf. However, in reviewing a copy of the Handbook for Chromatographia a year or two ago I did point out that one needed both large and strong hands to lift it and that some sub-division of the information was desirable. It was, therefore, that I looked forward to reviewing a reference book by the same publisher aimed at analytical chemists. Of the fifteen chapters I am unable to judge the utility of some, due to ignorance of the particular topic on my part. However, the chapters on chromatography and the more general chapters form a sufficient proportion of the book to enable me to offer a reasonable assessment of the whole. The first thing that was unclear is just what sort of a readership the book is aimed at—those involved in analytical research and development, those involved in routine analysis or both; on the whole I would have thought that it would be mainly of interest to the research worker. The next thing that bothered me was the age of much of the material. I can understand that a physical constant such as the thermal conductivity of hydrogen is unlikely to warrant a reference to work dating to the current century, but I find it hard to justify the inclusion of ten pages of stationary phase for packed column GC that could (perhaps did) come straight out of a consumables supplier’s catalogue in the 1970s. 25 pages are devoted to liquid crystal phases for GC but the references given date back to the 1970s and 1980s and I doubt they find much use today. References books are frequently cited as first editions. For example, under derivatising agents for chromatography, the 1977 book by Blau et al. is given in the references whereas the second edition published in 1993 would have been more appropriate. This dated information applies to the section on HPLC (described as ‘‘reverse phase’’ rather than the correct ‘‘reversed phase’’) with data that might once have been highly relevant but are now of doubtful utility. A section on derivatives for UV detection would have been valuable when this was the main workhorse for HPLC, but this is no longer the case nowadays where HPLC–MS and HPLC– MS–MS are commonplace. There does not seem to be any mention of the 1.8 lm particle phases, now fashionable, so that the table of column efficiencies on p159 again is at best obsolescent. There is, however, a useful section on chiral stationary phases with a list of much more recent references with one dated 2006. Under TLC there is a table of spray reagents for various functional groups and Bibliography Handbook of Basic Tables for Chemical Analysis, 3rd Edition, Thomas J. Bruno and Paris D. N. Svoronos (Eds), CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL,