In 1,860 pages, heavy as a big chunk of coal, a new Encyclopedia of Appalachia aims to tell people a few things they don't know about the oft-mythic mountain region.

	For more information or to order a copy of the Encyclopeda of Appalachia, visit www.etsu.edu.

Rudy Abramson, the tome's co-editor, believes Pittsburgh is more a part of the region than many people think, and points out that it was the steel industry and Pittsburgh banks that "played such an overarching role in the exploitation of the timber and coal down in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky."

One objective for the project was to "disabuse" people of negative notions, including Appalachians themselves. "But we wanted to get it right more than anything else," said Mr. Abramson, a former Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, who now lives in Reston, Va. He was 58 when the project started a decade ago. He's delighted that it's finished and thinks it can be useful in many ways.

"One of the things this book does is show what an incredibly diverse place the region is, not just in terms of culture, but also in ecology and business," said Mr. Abramson.

Among the unexpected facts he learned is that the region is home to more than 50 species of orchids, as well as 100 colonies of the rare box huckleberry, one of the oldest known living plants. One colony, thought to be 13,000 years old, is located in Pennsylvania's Perry County.

Of course, Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh are just a tiny part of the federally defined 13-state region. Western Pennsylvania is not part of Appalachia's five-state "core" -- "where the affinity of history, culture, the economy, and the mountain land is strongest" -- but neighboring West Virginia is.

The book, which is being published by The Center for Appalachian Studies and Services at East Tennessee State University and the University of Tennessee Pressk, drew funding from many sources, including the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The project's vast cast of more than 1,500 includes editorial board members and section editors from Juniata College, the University of Pittsburgh at Titusville, West Virginia University and Youngstown State University. Other contributors from the Pittsburgh area wrote articles, many with local flavor.

	Graphic Map of the Appalachia Region

There are entries on Pittsburgh Brewing Co. and Iron City beer, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre and Fallingwater, and references to many other area individuals and institutions, from the Crawfords, a Negro League baseball team, to the Post-Gazette, the first newspaper this side of the mountains that give the region its name.

The 2,000 entries and 300 photographs and illustrations are divided into 30 sections in five major divisions: The Landscape, The People, Work and the Economy, Cultural Traditions, and Institutions.

The work embraces a huge range of topics, some scholarly, presented to be readable by a wide audience. Leafing through, one might stop at "New Deal Communities," "Coon Dog Cemetery," Wheeling's "Marsh Stogies," "Coverlets," "Dried Apple Stack Cake," "Skillet Lickers," "Gays and Lesbians," "Backsliding," "Knotts, Don," "Grandfather Mountain" and "Fatback (see Pork)."

Who knew that the long-running hillbilly comic strip "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith" gave us the terms "heebie jeebies" and "horsefeathers"?

As laid out in its introduction, the encyclopedia attempts to document Appalachia as not a social and economic problem, but as a real, if often redefined and constantly changing, place -- one that is "too diverse to generalize about."

As Mr. Abramson's co-editor, Jean Haskell, concludes in her "Hillbilly" article, "The hillbilly both attracts and repels, representing both the complexity of Appalachia and the ambivalence about the region in the public mind."

The book is to debut officially on Friday at the Appalachian Studies Association conference "Both Ends of the Road: Making the Appalachian Connection," at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. (About four hours west of Pittsburgh and just outside Appalachia's boundaries, Dayton became home to many Appalachian migrants in the 1950s and '60s; Mr. Abramson believes holding the gathering there may signal a shift toward more interest in northern Appalachia.)

The book, at $79.95 (at most bookstores and online sellers), is targeted more to schools and other institutions than individual buyers, as are others in the growing oeuvre of regional and state encyclopedias.

The editors hope funding comes through for digital and perhaps children's versions and regular updates.

The encyclopedia notes that rather than a finished product, they "look upon it as a beginning, a cornerstone of a regional reference that will be increasingly accessible, relevant and useful."