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

Saving the world from itself: H.G. Wells consults his volumes at home in Kent

* A shy and introverted boy, Otlet began ordering things in his life from a young age; after school, while others played with hoops, he enjoyed reclassifying the books in his student library. When La Fontaine won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913, he was acclaimed as ‘the effective leader of the peace movement in Europe’. A losing battle, alas, and an ironically grisly one: the following year, in one of its first conflicts of the war, the British army would be forced into bloodied retreat by the Germans in – of all places – Mons.

* One could make the case, of course, that the Paris Expo was itself encyclopaedic. As Alex Wright observes, the show was not yet the gaudy parade of corporate-sponsored glamour that such things would become. Certainly there was hoopla, and much excitement over new cinema technologies, escalators and food preservation (Campbell’s soup cans made an early appearance), but this combined with a series of ‘august-sounding international congresses’ to make it as much an academic convention as a trade fair. The novel topics for discussion would soon inform new pages in Britannica and Brockhaus: psychology, aeronautics, vegetarianism, homeopathy, alpinism and beverage-yielding fruits. See Alex Wright, Cataloguing the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford, 2014).

* Leonie La Fontaine, a leading figure in the Belgian peace and women’s rights movements, believed that the Mundaneum would advance both causes by connecting like-minded individuals throughout the world. She established the Office central de documentation féminine (1909), an early networking group.

* It was an early multidisciplinary approach, but not too removed from what Coleridge attempted with his Metropolitana.