Stanley Young is a freelance writer. He has been a member of the Guild since 1987 and an admirer of dictionaries for much longer. It's been months since I opened my well-thumbed dictionary and the reason is Bookshelf '94. The American Heritage Dictionary, The Original Roget's Thesaurus, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, Hammond Intermediate World Atlas, The World Almanac and Book of Facts, and People's Chronology. The dictionary is blessedly comprehensive and almost impossible to stump.
Entries contain etymologies and include an audio version of the correct pronunciation.
Roget's, of course, blows the typical word-processor variety thesaurus out of the water. The atlas is also not overly detailed but it is thorough enough to show you where Bishkek is. Zip over to the atlas for a stirring electronic rendition of the Kyrgyzstani anthem. Setup of the CD-ROM on your hard disk is a breeze and only takes up 2 MB of space. Yes, there are also some video and audio clips, including snippets of modern poets reading their own work, not to mention photographs, illustrations, and a handful of animated sequences.