In a message dated 7/19/2004 6:45:55 PM Eastern Daylight Time, jakob@IMSA.EDU
writes:
>Thanks to those of you who welcomed me to the world of conlang and gave me
>suggestions on books-- I'm going to order The World's Major Languages from
>Amazon.com soon.
Another book I wanted to mention is volume 17 of the Smithsonian
Institution's _Handbook of North American Indians_. It is perhaps prohibitively expensive
for many people to buy ( > $100) but it's often found in public libraries (in
my experience in the US). It has description of 12 languages (about 30 pages
each) plus a lot of other linguistic info.