All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia

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At the peak of his fame, the broadcaster Michael Aspel turned his hand to many things. He was ‘suave’ and ‘silver-tongued’, and for a while British television couldn’t get enough of him. He began his career as a newsreader, and would soon be one of the most popular, respected and reliably bland personalities on air, presenting Ask Aspel, Antiques Roadshow and long-running radio shows on London’s Capital Radio and BBC Radio 2.

In 1973 I was in the audience at the Golders Green Hippodrome when he presented the children’s comedy/challenge show Crackerjack. That was also the year he was asked by Encyclopaedia Britannica to promote its latest edition.

Aspel appeared in magazine adverts in a grey flannel suit leaning against a shiny bookcase displaying twenty-four slabs bound in crimson. The wraparound text explained the usual stuff: 10,000 and more leading world authorities, 28,000 pages, 22,000 pictures, illustrations and maps. The text also explained that if you wanted yet more of Aspel he would come to your home free of charge, and with absolutely no obligation, in the form of a flexi disc, a 7-inch record made from very thin plastic that spun at 33 revolutions per minute. I sent off for the disc, and it was good to hear Michael’s voice.

‘This is Michael Aspel,’ he began, as familiar music played in the background. ‘No doubt you’ll recognise this bit of Beethoven,’ he said. ‘This great composer is described in Encyclopaedia Britannica as having “a musical imagination that was constantly alive”. Do you enjoy meeting people who have minds that are constantly alive?’

Imagine answering ‘no’ to that.

Children have lively minds, Aspel continues, and they want answers. ‘Lively minds shouldn’t be starved,’ he reasons. ‘That leads to apathy, frustration, waste.’ There was, of course, an easy way to feed these minds: Britannica was ‘a powerhouse of knowledge’.

Then there was a forty-five-second audio clip of an Apollo launch, and an assurance from Aspel that the Britannica was right up to date; he said there was even an article about colour television. And the Britannica had many uses beyond just helping the children – you could also widen your social contacts and further your business career. ‘Whatever the reason, I hope you will extend the courtesy you have shown in listening to me to the Encyclopaedia Britannica representative when he calls.’ (It was understood that because you had requested this record, a salesman now had your address and would be appearing on your doorstep soon.) Aspel closed by suggesting that by listening this far in the record you have already displayed a lively mind, and you would probably enjoy the quiz on the other side.

The quiz, which was read by someone other than Aspel, had twelve questions. Where did the camel come from? What has campanology to do with? How did the saxophone get its name? Alas, the record supplied no answers. For those you would have to wait until the Britannica representative paid you a little visit.

But then, a year later, Aspel’s sales pitch – all that dapper effort – was useful no more. The edition he was plugging, and the one the representative had subsequently tried hard to sell you – the fourteenth, which, since its first publication in 1929, had been revised in 1930, 1932, 1933, 1936, 1937, and every year to 1973 – had now been declared redundant. Harvey Einbinder’s time had come: the publication would soon receive a complete overhaul, including the information about the camel, campanology and the saxophone. Aspel would be all right – he would go on to advertise no-calorie Sweetex and host This Is Your Life – but the Britannica would never be the same again.

Lively minds shouldn’t be starved: Michael Aspel sells Britannica in the 1970s

The fifteenth edition of 1974 was unlike any encyclopaedia that preceded it, and its editors hoped there would never be a need for another. It was a vast and complicated endeavour, thirteen years in the making, and it arrived with the sort of operating instructions that might have floored Steve Wozniak. Gone were the days when Britannica came with a statement of intent and an explanation of cross-referencing. Taking possession of the new thirty-volume edition now involved a personal handover, and its instructions came with pie charts.*

The intention was both forward-looking and retrograde. The preface referred to a ‘Circle of Learning’, a concept that rooted it in the traditions of the ancient Greeks. The new edition aimed to give the reader access to its contents by both alphabetical order and topical subject matter. This time a reader didn’t get one encyclopaedia but three (indeed, rather than the fifteenth edition, it was sometimes called Britannica 3). There was the one-volume ‘Propaedia’, described as ‘a kind of preamble or antechamber to the world of learning that the rest of the encyclopaedia aims to encompass’. This encompassing was to be found in the ten-volume ‘Micropaedia’ (‘ready reference’ volumes containing short information on 102,000 topics) and the nineteen-volume ‘Macropaedia’ (containing knowledge in greater depth on 4200 topics). There was also the promise of annual yearbooks, the latter designed to keep the reader up to speed with world events at about the same pace as the information they’d already purchased in thirty volumes hastened towards obsolescence. No one gets to launch a monument like this without the stats: 33,141 pages, 43 million words, 25,000 illustrations. There were 4000 contributing authors from more than 100 countries. In June 1974 the advertisements heralded ‘the first new idea in encyclopaedias for 200 years … the encyclopaedia that will wear out from use, not from time.’

The price was at least £249, or about $500, and considerably more if you wanted the full morocco. The editorial creation of the work cost $32 million exclusive of printing costs: the Britannica justifiably claimed that this made it the largest single private investment in publishing history.*

Explaining the concept in a BBC interview at the time of its launch, Mortimer J. Adler, the chairman of the Board of Editors, said:

Let’s take Napoleon for a moment … You’re doing some research, and you want to find out very quickly the date that Napoleon crowned himself Holy Roman Emperor. If you went to the old

Britannica

you’d find a ten-page article, twenty columns on Napoleon, and somewhere in that the date would be buried – you couldn’t find it quickly, you might thumb through it but you wouldn’t find it. Here you’d turn to the Micropaedia first and you’d get 700 words on Napoleon, with all the facts. And then if you wanted to read more we give you index references to the long article. We’ve separated the long background pieces from the short information pieces because they have two separate functions.

*

This sounded easy enough, but the preface of the Propaedia showed how the presentation of the world’s knowledge in the world’s most famous encyclopaedia was now much more complicated than a bit of thumbing-through.

Each section number [in the Propaedia’s seven-page Contents section] incorporates the numbers of the part and division to which it belongs. For example, Section 725 is the fifth section in Part Seven, Division II; Section 96/10 is the Tenth Section in Part Nine, Division VI. In each sectional outline the major subjects are indicated by capital letters (‘A’, ‘B’ etc). There are always at least two major subjects, but there may be many more in a given section. When it is necessary to subdivide a major subject, up to three additional levels may appear in the outline; the first is indicated by Arabic numerals, the second by lowercase letters, and the third by Roman numerals.

There were then five pie charts relating to ten subject matters (from Life on Earth to The History of Mankind), each subject rotating to occupy a different piece of pie in the circle depending on which subject was at the centre, and therefore at the heart of a reader’s initial enquiry. And these were followed by some detailed examples designed to make finding information (about biology, say) a little easier.

Section 10.34 in Division III of Part Ten examines the nature, methods, problems and history of the biological sciences; but the knowledge of life that the biological sciences afford is outlined in Part Three. Or, to take another example, Section 10/41 in Division IV of Part Ten examines historiography and the study of history; but the actual history of mankind is outlined in Part Nine.

Not everyone found this classification edifying (or knew what the hell was going on). It is worth noting that this was not some elaborate and very expensive joke; it was a genuine and clearly overthought attempt to redefine how the communication of knowledge was absorbed in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Alas, this fabulously complex system may have already come too late: 1974 marked at least one other milestone in communication – the first mobile phone call. In the New Yorker, Hans Koning reasoned that the very form in which the fifteenth edition was published ‘showed that knowledge now came in a shattered, scattered avalanche of data, to which no category such as “purpose” was attached.’

According to an essay by Geoffrey Wolff in the Atlantic in 1974, the editors of the fifteenth edition ‘worried copy mercilessly’. Every article was rigorously outlined before the contributor got to work, and the writer ‘was warned that to add to the material in his outline would be to duplicate material appearing elsewhere in the set, while to ignore something included in the outline would be to leave it out of the set.’ Wolff quotes one of Britannica’s executive editors: ‘We really shoved it down their throats.’

This may explain why this edition sometimes reads as if it’s written by a committee, and a committee devoid of character or warmth. Geoffrey Wolff reasoned convincingly that one shouldn’t expect to have much fun with it, for it lacked eccentricity, elegance and surprise, ‘the singular qualities that make learning an inviting transaction’. He singled out the article on Gout. In the eleventh edition this ran to two and a half pages (gout provoked ‘a remarkable tendency to gnashing of the teeth’, and the parts affected ‘cannot bear the weight of the bedclothes’). There was also a fascinating if questionable moral aspect (gout was less common in countries where its citizens had fewer ‘errors in living’). ‘That’s the kind of stuff a gouty reader can take some pleasure from,’ Wolff declared. The shorter methodical entry in the fifteenth edition observes how ‘the elevation of uric acid appears to be transmitted by an autosomal gene.’*

That said, it still does what any encyclopaedia should. It carries tens of thousands of authoritative, interesting and useful articles. That’s in the general Macropaedia, the sort of encyclopaedia one has grown accustomed to over the years. But upon opening the highly exacting world of the Micropaedia we enter a very different and strange universe. One tries to apply some logic to it – by examining, for example, the fifty-six-page article on ‘Logic, The History and Kinds of’, all 70,000-plus words and equations of it – and one is left exhausted. This was not general learning, this was extreme obsession, and it was not an exception. There are hundreds of columns on such far-reaching and rather hard-to-grapple topics such as Cities (ten pages), Climate and Weather (eighty-six pages), and Continental Landforms (fifty-five pages). After Climate and Weather there are six pages on Cnidarians.*

As always, this exhaustive enterprise could be paid for in monthly instalments, the precise amount dependent on the quality of leather slapped around it. But the fifteenth edition also came with the revival of something Britannica hadn’t offered for decades – a ‘personal knowledge assistant’. If the volumes in your possession didn’t already answer everything under the sun, or didn’t provide answers in enough depth, and if the world was moving just too fast for its pages, you were entitled to call on Britannica’s Library Research Service. This had been created in 1936, and its department of ‘Answer Girls’ featured heavily in its promotions. Having fallen from favour in the 1960s, it was now being revived with vigour.*

Every purchaser received 100 coupons to be redeemed for one of two products. The first was an ‘instant response system’ by which the coupon-holder could select from 10,000 written reports that didn’t make it into either the Micropaedia or Macropaedia. The extensive catalogue included: R-201 – ‘The Value and Utilization of Poultry Manure and Deep Litter as Fertilizer and Stock Feed’; 3R-53 – ‘The Hazards of Wind Shear and Microbursts’; 3R-148 – ‘Establishing a Pecan Grove’; R-140 – ‘Zea Diploperennis and the Possibility of Breeding Perennial Corn’; and R-5662 – ‘Influences of Oriental Mysticism upon Ralph Waldo Emerson’ (to sample just the Agriculture, Aeronautics and American Literature sections).

The second research product was up to you. For ten years from the date of purchase, a Britannica owner could ask up to 100 questions ‘on matters of fact’, as many as ten questions per year. The answers to these questions would then arrive in the post, varying in length from a few lines to a few pages. It was a sort of Alexa/Siri service before its time, although it did take up to a month for any questions to be answered, and the service would be suspended in the event of a user slipping into arrears on their instalment plan, and no questions could be answered regarding personal medical or legal matters, and no research would be conducted relating to public competitions with a cash prize.

In the same interview in which he’d explained the diminution and aggrandisement of Napoleon, Dr Mortimer Adler was asked about the possibility of mistakes in his thirty-two volumes.

‘We have a vast staff of data verifiers or fact checkers,’ he said. ‘And even so, of course, errors do creep in. I would guess there may be 2000 or 3000 small errors, typographical errors, little errors of fact that we have to correct within the next printing and the printing after that. It’s impossible not to. Every encyclopaedia has errors, and it’s a constant vigilance to keep finding them and correcting them.’

‘So when will the information that a cricket pitch is ten-foot long [rather than the correct 66 feet] be corrected?’ asked the man from the BBC.

‘In the next printing! In 1975!’

The BBC man also wondered how long it would be before the new edition went out of date.

‘We think we have produced an encyclopaedia that is so flexible, and so capacious in its structure that it will accommodate any changes in knowledge in the next fifty years at least.’*

If we still have the Encyclopaedia Britannica in our homes, the fifteenth edition is probably the one we have. True to Dr Adler’s word, annual revisions continued into the late 1990s, and the set received a major overhaul in 1985. Articles were redesigned, reorganised and amalgamated, and the set expanded to thirty-two volumes, including a two-volume index that readers had suggested would have been useful when trying to negotiate the original version. The price was now about £1000 or $1500.

Perhaps – out of curiosity, or because we felt sorry for it just lying there – we might even consult the monolith from time to time. What we would never do, unless we were crazy, is read it in its entirety.

Step forward the enthusiastic A.J. Jacobs. In 2003, much to the amusement and then consternation of his wife, he undertook to tackle the literary equivalent of the north face of the Eiger, reading the fifteenth edition complete and unabridged in a year. Jacobs, a writer on Esquire, hoped to achieve two goals: reduce his television consumption, and in the process ‘become the smartest person in the world’. He then achieved a third goal: writing an amusing book about his challenge. He revels in the joys of learning, although often plays the clown:

‘I’m completely ignorant of this man,’ he writes of Petrarch, ‘but he sounds like someone I should know about.’ He concludes that Petrarch’s devotion to his chaste love Laura would today be called stalking and result in a restraining order. He throws in a large amount of pop-culture gags and interjections from family and friends. He reads the entry on Plato on a train journey with his wife Julie to see her brother Doug in Philadelphia. If that isn’t too much information in a book about information, we also learn that his wife’s rash has cleared up. This is clearly a running gag, but there is no cross-referencing.*

A.J. Jacobs was not the first to attempt a complete read. George Bernard Shaw claimed he had studied most of Britannica’s ninth in the British Museum reading room, although he admitted to glossing over some of the science articles. The son of the novelist C.S. Forester remembers his father reading Britannica in bed, a physical as well as a literary achievement; in fact, he may have read the whole thing three times. A man called George Forman Goodyear, a lawyer in Buffalo, New York, took twenty-two years to read the complete fourteenth edition; the pioneering heart surgeon Michael DeBakey read the whole of the eleventh in his teens; Aldous Huxley apparently read the whole of the fourteenth, but randomly. He focused on a particular volume, and would then amuse a party crowd by his knowledge of things beginning with the letter N or P. And in 1934 the New Yorker reported on a man called A. Urban Shirk. Shirk was the advertising and sales manager of the International Products Corporation, which apparently isn’t a made-up name, and in his spare time on lonely business trips, Shirk liked nothing more than reading the fourteenth. He spent two to six months on each volume, and was currently up to Volume 4 (Brai to Cast). If some of the entries seemed familiar to him it was because he had already spent four and a half years reading the whole of the twenty-nine-volume eleventh edition.

UPMANSHIP (a diversion …)

For those unfamiliar with what people with greying hair like to call ‘the golden age of British television’, The Two Ronnies were Ronnie Barker (rotund, bumbling, professorial) and Ronnie Corbett (petite, pernickety, anecdotal). As comedians they were peak-time and family friendly, and they loved lexicography, spoonerisms and good puns. When, in 1975, a year after the latest Britannica, they pilloried the dreaded encyclopaedia salesman, they chose not to target the hapless soul himself, for he was just spreading knowledge and making ends meet, but instead something broader, and something all British viewers would understand: the class system. And like Python before them, they succeeded in undercutting all expectations.

The scene is a clichéd depiction of a northern working-class front room. A wife called Elsie is at the ironing board in curlers, a husband in a vest called Arthur is pumping the tyres on his upturned bike; all that’s missing is a whippet. A knock on the door reveals a hatted, raincoated salesman with a chirpy greeting. He is the middle-class invasion, probably from the south.

Ronnie Corbett (as the salesman): ‘Good morning, Sonny! Is your mummy in?’

Arthur is played by Ronnie Barker. It’s safe to assume that no one has called him ‘Sonny’ for at least forty years.

‘It’s another one of them sales, m’love,’ he calls to his wife in the front room.

The salesman enters and wonders whether he can interest them in a nice set of encyclopaedias. Each volume is full of very interesting information. For example, did they know that Siberian Lake Balkhash has an area of no less than 7050 square miles?

‘Yes.’ Arthur says as he returns to his bicycle.

Well how about the fact that the Yangtze Kiang is some 3400 miles long?

Yes, he knew that too.

Fine, but did he know that the highest mountain in South America was Mount Illampu at 3012 feet?

‘I think you’re wrong there, lad,’ Arthur says. ‘The highest mountain in South America is surely Mount Aconcagua, isn’t it? Which is over 69 feet higher than the Illampu, isn’t that right, our Elsie?’

Our Elsie disagrees – she thinks it’s Mount Cotopaxi. Luckily, their daughter Lily has just entered the room to settle the matter.

‘Oh, you’re not on that one again, are you?’ she asks as she settles in the easy chair to file her nails. ‘It’s Mount Chimborazo.’

This goes on for a while. The salesman has various other items to tease them with. Who said ‘Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage’? How does the diameter of Neptune compare with that of Earth? Name the dwarf monkey that lives in the Amazonian mountains and feeds on small flowers, roots and small birds. The window cleaner outside the parlour window, for some reason on a ladder on the ground floor, chips in with the answer: it’s the white-eared marmoset.

There is also mention of a neighbour named Mrs Butterworth, who recently ‘proved the existence of a fourth dimension’. The salesman, increasingly infuriated, begins ripping up pages from the book in his hands. He says he hasn’t sold one all week.

But then there’s a twist. Arthur says he’ll buy a set.

And then another twist: the salesman says the cost is £2 a week for five weeks, but Arthur, Elsie and Lily can’t agree what that will be in total. It may be £10, but it may also be £7.

* The Fifteenth was the edition I picked up from Cambridge in the Introduction.

* By the time the fifteenth edition was launched, Britannica had been an American publication for about sixty years. For decades it had been owned by Sears, Roebuck and Co., the mail order company based in Chicago, and then by a private charitable trust, the William Benton Foundation, which endowed the University of Chicago with Britannica’s proceeds.

* BBC Nationwide, 16 January 1974, interview by Christopher Rainbow.

* ‘Britannica 3, History Of’ by Geoffrey Wolff, the Atlantic, June 1974. Wolff’s essay also revealed how carefully the Britannica board kept their plans for the new edition secret not only from its competitors but also from much of its own sales force; it was important they continued to sell the fourteenth edition just a few weeks before it was superseded. Of course, present-day computer and mobile phone companies do much the same thing.

* I had to read the entry to find out: cnidarians are a particular type of aquatic animal comprising polyp and medusa, the latter commonly known as jellyfish. The more one wrote, the more one got paid, of course. The usual rate was 10 cents per word, and major contributors also received a complete edition when published.

* At its peak the Library Research Service employed more than 100 women producing about 100,000 reports. The attendant publicity material described a glamorous life, with many employees travelling from city to city by train in the interests of research, picking up a special Britannica typewriter left by a previous researcher at a railway station locker.

* That would take us to 2024. But in 1974, when Dr Adler was speaking, something else had just been born: the first node of the Internet.

* The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs (William Heinemann, 2005).