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

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EXTINCTION

According to Wikipedia, Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia began life as twenty-five volumes in 1912. In 1931 it was renamed Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Encyclopedia, and by 1945 it was known variously as New Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, Universal Standard Encyclopedia, Funk & Wagnalls Standard Reference Encyclopedia, and Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia. Like Ben & Jerry’s, its founders Isaac Kaufmann Funk and Adam Willis Wagnalls: a) established a reliable brand based on their name and b) found that their product really took flight when it became available in supermarkets. We have seen how its metamorphosis into Microsoft Encarta helped to destroy the very sector in which it once played a significant role.

What Wikipedia cannot help us with, is what the funk to do with the old print sets when they’re, yes, defunct. ‘The adult reader will find the encyclopedia an indispensable companion throughout his life,’ wrote the renowned Notre Dame University educator George N. Shuster in the preface to an edition from the 1960s. ‘I am sure that this Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia will, as did its predecessors, long hold an honoured place and a well-deserved reputation among English-speaking people everywhere.’ Apparently not. Not if one believes the discussion boards on the homemaker community site thriftyfun.com.

‘Are Funk & Wagnalls encyclopaedias from 1959 worth anything?’ asks a forum member named Diana in August 2011.

‘Unfortunately these old encyclopaedias do not sell at any price,’ replies Kathie K. ‘Most thrift stores will not even accept them as a donated item.’

‘You will never find anyone to take them so just put them out for the trash,’ adds Lilac. ‘Sorry.’

‘Maybe you can use them as a “safe” of sorts,’ suggests Stacy. ‘Just hollow out a portion of the pages to make a “well” and glue the pages’ edges together (but not the front cover or you won’t be able to get in it!).’

‘Libraries won’t take them,’ Lilac adds to her last message. ‘I know because I tried to get rid of my parents’ set. If you live in an area where this is allowed, put them in a box marked “free” and set them on your curb. If they are not gone in three days put them in the trash.’

The following year, the philosopher and writer Julian Baggini posted a video on YouTube with a different solution: he had decided to burn his set of Britannica. His film follows him from his garden, where we see the thirty-two-volume fifteenth edition gathering mould and seepage in leaky plastic storage tubs, to a big bonfire in a field. It’s a spectacular burn and a spectacular gesture.

A few months later, Baggini weighed the magnitude of his actions in the online magazine Aeon. He quoted Heinrich Heine: ‘Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings,’ the German poet and playwright wrote in 1821. The most egregiously insulted were ‘all the parents who, like mine, sacrificed so much for the benefit of their children’s education,’ Baggini continued. ‘Most families who signed up to the “book a month payment plan” were really buying a promise of a better life for their children.’ This was often advertised as The Britannica Advantage, a position of privilege available to those already advantaged, and of course that advantage had long since been eroded by the Internet. ‘Encyclopaedias belong to a time when knowledge was owned by a handful of established authorities, who decided not only what was true but what deserved to be ennobled by its inclusion. Their feel of leather-bound permanence encouraged us to forget the dynamic nature of scientific knowledge.’

In the end Baggini believed the books were already dead, slain not only by pixels and bytes but the erosion of our belief in experts.

Forest of knowledge: Britannica grows anew in ‘Branches Unbound’ by Wendy Wahl (2011)

Before the incineration, Baggini had considered making his Britannica into an art project. He thought about transforming each volume by shredding it in public and using the paper ribbons to make papier-mâché facsimiles. These would then be auctioned online, with proceeds possibly going to buy books or computers for Africa. He concluded that ‘as with other conceptual art projects, perhaps as much is achieved by describing it as by actually creating it’.

Online, there are many other exciting uses for a dead encyclopaedia: lampshades, footstools, dolls’ houses. Many volumes have never been so useful. One of the strangest repurposings involves a man named Peter Yearsley, a veteran of audio books (perhaps you’ve heard him read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Kafka’s In the Penal Colony; his technique is solid rather than involving, more BBC News than Stephen Fry).

For our purposes his biggest hit is a fifty-two-minute video on YouTube entitled ‘Soft Spoken Man Reads Encyclopedia’. The additional title is ‘A really boring video to help you sleep now.’ Yearsley reads entries beginning with C from Britannica’s classic eleventh edition. The visuals are easy-going – a bankside view of the Pacific Ocean gently lapping up on Bowen Island, British Columbia, with the leaves of a book obscuring the bottom right of the picture. This may then have been judged too stimulating, as the screen turns entirely black at 15.50. Audio highlights include:

COOKERY (Lat. coquus, a cook): the art of preparing and dressing food of all sorts for human consumption, of converting the raw materials, by the application of heat or otherwise, into a digestible and pleasing condition, and generally ministering to the satisfaction of the appetite and the delight of the palate. We may take it that some form of cookery has existed from the earliest times, and its progress has been from the simple to the elaborate, dominated partly by the foods accessible to man, partly by the stage of civilization he has attained, and partly by the appliances at his command for the purpose either of treating the food, or of consuming it when served.

If you’re still awake at this point you will be entertained by the history of cooking, with things warming up when the story reaches France. In dulcet tones, we learn, for example, that ‘The French Revolution was temporarily a blow to Parisian cookery, as to everything else of the Ancien Régime.’

And if you’re still lively after this I suggest you scroll back an entry or two to

CONVOLVULACEAE: a botanical natural order belonging to the series Tubiflorae of the sympetalous group of Dicotyledons. It contains about forty genera with more than 1000 species, and is found in all parts of the world except the coldest, but is especially well developed in tropical Asia and tropical America. The most characteristic members of the order are twining plants with generally smooth heart-shaped leaves and large showy white or purple flowers, as, for instance, the greater bindweed of English hedges, Calystegia sepium, and many species of the genus Ipomaea, the largest of the order, including the ‘convolvulus major’ of gardens.

And so it goes on, until you are well entwined, if not in the arms of Morpheus, at least by the alluring roots of the efficient tropical sand-binder Ipomaea Pes-Caprae. I did find it mildly soporific, and perhaps only the task of typing it out kept me awake. Mostly I found Yearsley’s rendition annoying. But the comments below the video are appreciative. ‘Is it weird that I actually find this really interesting? Especially the section about cookery.’; ‘I just slept with this on and now I’m Albert Einstein.’; ‘Used this the night before my final flight test. Got a great night sleep and now I’m a commercial airline pilot.’

YouTube, of course, will not let you go at that. Dead encyclopaedias continue to entertain almost as much as they did in rude health. In September 2021 a short clip emerged of the England footballer Jack Grealish being interviewed about his footballing knowledge. A few weeks before, Grealish had signed to Manchester City for £100 million, a new British transfer record.

Interviewer: Dean Smith also says you’re an encyclopaedia of football. Where does that come from?

Grealish: A what?

Interviewer: An encyclopaedia of football.

Grealish: I don’t know what that means.

Interviewer: Well, you know what an encyclopaedia is … an encyclopaedia is a book that has descriptions of every word and thing and everything else in it, and in terms of football you have an encyclopaedic knowledge.

Grealish: Oh. Erm, yeah.

But these old books were already an unexpectedly novel proposition to young people in 2015, when the YouTube channel React posted the video ‘Teens React to Encyclopedias’. It’s a rather sweet eight-minute watch, very sharply edited, with eleven kids between fourteen and nineteen displaying a range of spontaneous emotions as they’re presented with the complete World Book from 2005. There’s astonishment, intrigue, annoyance, delight, eye-rolling, face-covering, gesticulating. There’s a lot of ‘Wait – what?’

As the books pile up in front of them, a sample:

‘I don’t got to read all these do I?’

‘They’re encyclopaedias!’

‘Can I look at them? [Opens one.] Yup, boring already.’

‘In ancient areas of our library they have dusty books that look exactly like this.’

[Host:] ‘What

is

an encyclopaedia?’

‘It tells you about stuff.’

‘It’s like a dictionary for different stuff.’

‘A collection of books of knowledge.’

‘It’s the Internet in books.’

‘It was Google way back in the day. It was the worst of times!’

[Host:] ‘So go ahead and find the chapter on Reading.’

‘Oh … R!’

‘Okay … wait.’

[Flipping through:] ‘Dang. This is so, so much.’

‘Come on. It takes forever. This is why I don’t use these.’

‘R-E-A … Oh, I’m getting close!’

‘Ah, Reading. I found it!’

[Host:] ‘Now let’s test the encyclopaedia. Come up with anything that you can think of.’

‘Are there people in encyclopaedias? Let’s look up Tycho Brahe. Tycho Brahe was an astronomer who was most famous for having his nose cut off in a battle and it was replaced with a metal nose. Here’s Braiding. Here’s Bracks. Brahe, Tycho! Heyyyy!’

[Host:] ‘Can you imagine relying just on these books for information compared to the information that’s at your fingertips today?’

‘In theory I could.’

‘I would hate it, I would hate it, I would hate it.’

‘Five whole minutes of my life is gone! When I could have found it .000098 seconds with Google.’

[Host:] Are there any advantages to a physical encyclopaedia compared to the Internet or Wikipedia?’

‘I’m pretty sure there is, but no.’

The video has been watched more than 4 million times. It left me with the intended reaction, a very clear sense of how something so much a part of my life for so long can suddenly seem so absurd to a younger generation. World Book isn’t like the vinyl LP; it shows no sign of making a comeback. It’s more like the horse and cart; you can understand it, and you can understand how eager we were to grasp its brilliant if problematic replacement.