M
METHOD
We do not have the guidance notes given to contributors for the Eleventh Edition of Britannica, but we do have them for the next major set published eighteen years later in 1929.* It’s a revealing document, part style sheet, part commissioning form, part sincere editorial cheerleading. And as a statement of intent it provides a rare insight into encyclopaedic purpose early in the twentieth century.
Produced at Britannica’s London headquarters in High Holborn in the spring of 1927, it began by justifying why a new ‘epoch-making’ edition was necessary. ‘It is planned to perform a service for the average intelligent man or woman that has never been done before. It has been attempted only in part, and then inadequately and intermittently.’
The proposed service was the continuation of a familiar policy: the further broadening of accessibility, the further diminution of the ivory tower. The editorial policy was ‘a result of careful study … extending over a period of more than a year’, the twelve-page leaflet began.
The last few generations, and more particularly the last half century, have seen an increase in knowledge beyond all precedent. While the man of to-day does know more than his forebears of one or two centuries ago, he is relatively much more ignorant. The reason is simple. There has been no organised attempt to present the results of modern research in a form that would be comprehensible to him. This is an age of specialisation, and with a few exceptions specialists have been content to write for other specialists rather than inform the public. Consequently a vast section of what is known to-day remains a sealed book to the average person. This situation is one that has caused lively concern to many students of our contemporary life. It is a situation which the new edition of the
Britannica
will be designed to meet.
*
To bridge the gap between the average reader and modern knowledge, the editors drew up a fifteen-point plan. In summary:
Write every article so that it can be understood ‘by anyone of average intelligence and education’. The editors acknowledged that such a task may present ‘a severe limitation’ on the text, and that many subjects will be difficult to treat in simple language. ‘That problem is one which the contributor must face … there are books even on relativity which present that difficult subject so that an intelligent man can grasp it.’*
Be interesting, be lively, be picturesque. ‘Do not antagonise, do not repel the reader by a dull, forbidding style.’
Write for ‘a leisured audience’ and help the reader in the pursuit of their business or hobby. Seek to answer most of the common questions that arise in everyday living: the new readership will include many who are interested in ‘such ordinary practical details as how to repair a Ford or paint a house’.
The new edition will be designed to grip the attention of the reader and hold it, no matter where he should open a volume. Illustrations will therefore be of the utmost importance, ‘second only to the text’. Stand by for a further communication as to how you may assist the art department.
Articles should not be local but international, and should appeal to readers of English everywhere in the world. ‘The English author writing on, say, Wages, Trade Unions, Armies, Ships, should not confine himself to facts relating to Great Britain, but should include also the United States, Germany, and such other countries that may be of importance in connection with the subject.’
Any words or quotations in a foreign language should be translated.
Any important article should include not only a bibliography, but also an indication of whether the book in question is for the expert or popular in nature.
Don’t exceed your commissioned length. It is the maximum, and it will greatly aid the editor if your entry is precisely that amount. ‘Otherwise, the editors will have to condense, a proceeding naturally not pleasing to the contributors, or return to the authors themselves for condensation.’
Send in your entry promptly.
Do not use the ambiguous and excluding words ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’ etc.
When writing at length, provide cross headings, subheadings and side headings. For example ‘a long article, such as France, Electricity, Philosophy, should be divided into its important divisions, eras, or what not’ (for example: The French Revolution; The Rise of Napoleon; The Battle of Marengo). To make life easier for editor and reader alike, cross headings should occur every three to ten thousand words, followed by sub-headings at one to three thousand words, and then side headings of three to seven hundred words. Triple wavy lines, double wavy lines, and single wavy lines should distinguish between them.
If you must use technical terms, explain them to the non-technical.
Always give a person’s name in full when used for the first time.
Send in your entry typewritten with a carbon copy. One will go to the printer, while the other will immediately be placed in safe custody.
When you send in your article, also send in a brief summary of your degrees and other qualifications for inclusion in the contributors panel at the front.
Britannica’s contributors were co-ordinated by more than fifty associate editors in London and New York, and they had assembled quite a line-up:
Cecil B. DeMille (Motion Pictures), Lillian Gish (also Motion Pictures), G.K. Chesterton (Charles Dickens), J.B. Priestley (English Literature), T.E. Lawrence (Guerrilla Warfare), John J. Pershing (the Meuse–Argonne Operation), Ralph Vaughan Williams (Folk Song), Gene Tunney (Boxing), Harold Laski (Bolshevism), Konstantin Stanislavsky (Theatre Directing and Acting), Alfred P. Sloan Jr (General Motors), Helen Wills (Lawn Tennis), J.B.S. Haldane (Heredity) Erté (Modern Dress), and Orville Wright (Wilbur Wright). And several hundred professors from leading universities.
Each of these figures was paid the same as less famous contributors: two cents per word, a fee that remained unchanged from 1926 to 1973. In 1926 George Bernard Shaw received $68.50 for his article on Socialism, while Albert Einstein received $86.40 for his piece on Space-Time. (Beyond the famous contributors, a great many of the important new articles were in the scientific fields, including the latest thinking about Vitamins, Carbohydrates, Muscular Exercise, Insulin, X-Rays and Stellar Evolution.)
Before they submitted their entries, the contributors received one last pep talk. Their commissioners vowed not to lessen ‘by one hair’s breadth’ the accuracy or authority of their submissions, nor the elevated scholarly position that Britannica enjoyed. But ‘may the editors once more emphasise the great importance of writing all articles in a style so interesting that the average reader who begins them will read to the end.’
Britannica, after all, was for many families the only important educational book to be found in their homes: ‘Its influence in the diffusion of information is and has been profound,’ and there was a duty to honour that trust. The aim was definitive: the contributors would write ‘the most useful, the most instructive and the most enlightening work that has ever been produced’.
The resulting twenty-four-volume fourteenth edition appeared two years later in 1929, and it would remain in print (with minor updates and new printings) for forty-five years. One didn’t have to be as astute as its writers to surmise that the widening of the encyclopaedia’s appeal was driven by an equally expansive quest for an increase in sales. And something else too: an overdue attempt to improve the perception of the encyclopaedia in the popular imagination.
* This was the fourteenth edition, the first complete overhaul since the First World War. The twelfth and thirteenth editions consisted of supplements to the eleventh.
* This was the perennial battle. Intriguingly, Britannica had first acknowledged the difficulty in the preface to its first edition in 1768, announcing that ‘any man of ordinary parts, may, if he chuses, learn the principles of Agriculture, of Astronomy, of Botany, of Chemistry, &c.’ Comparing its contents to previous encyclopaedias and dictionaries, its editor noted his competitors’ ‘folly of attempting to communicate science under the various technical terms’.
* Recipients of this style sheet were referred to The Humanizing of Knowledge by James Harvey Robinson (George H. Dorian Co., 1924). One key passage: ‘Scientifically and philosophically trained writers apparently have no idea how hard their books and articles are for the general reader: how much is included that few can appreciate; how many statements are dark and unintelligible to those for whom the book is ostensibly designed.’ Robinson’s work must have had a stinging impact in the Britannica offices, not least because the author was a contributor himself (‘Civilisation’), and because it quoted select passages from the twelfth edition (essentially the eleventh with supplements). As with the contributions of Lord Rayleigh (see end of ‘K’ above), the subject of light proved particularly problematic. ‘A stream of light coming directly from a natural source has no relation to space except that concerned in its direction of propagation, round which its properties are alike on all sides.’ The Humanizing of Knowledge concluded, ‘Like the lovers in Dante’s Commedia, the simple inquirer is likely to read no farther that day.’