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

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THE SINGLE VOLUME

In the early 1930s, Columbia University decided it would expand its teaching facility into a new area. It would capitalise on its reputation by publishing its own encyclopaedia, and it would stand out from the crowd by cramming everything between one set of covers. The full title was The Columbia Encyclopedia in One Volume, and when it launched in 1935 the first topic to look up was Hernia. The surface area of a breadboard, the thickness of a mattress, here was an organ that had burst its regular boundaries. It had 1949 pages, and consulting it was fraught with bad possibilities, including ruptured intestines, broken limbs, and (if you dropped it on someone’s head) murder. In later years it became known as the Columbia Desk Encyclopedia, not only because it was often to be found on the issuing desk of a library, but also because moving it was like moving a bureau.

What was the big idea? This wasn’t a junior encyclopaedia (there were no illustrations), and it obviously wasn’t a condensed one (it contained 52,000 articles compared to 45,000 in the full Britannica). Its preface explains that not long ago, an encyclopaedia would contain ‘substantially all the book learning of the minister, the physician, the lawyer, the teacher, the businessman, the scientist and the historian. Specialisation has made any such achievement now quite hopeless … First aid is all that a general encyclopedia can now give successfully.’

There were no treatises; the articles were unsigned; no maps or illustrations; no expert was allowed to present their interpretation of a subject without it being inspected and amended by others (an article about a Roman Catholic topic, for example, would be read and revised by either a Protestant or a Jew). Its chief editor Clarke F. Ansley explained that a reference work as authoritative as this one hoped to be could never succeed if its accuracy was compromised by original opinion. If this made for a rather dull but reliable read (and it generally did), then that was an acceptable compromise. And it steered away from anything that might cause controversy or offence, so here too there was no mention of homosexuality, or indeed any sexuality, and ‘Sex’ was limited to the reproductive organs of animals. Sexpartite Vault, on the other hand, was awarded thirty lines, the first of which began, ‘Developed in medieval masonry construction, from the difficulty of vaulting an oblong space with ribs of exclusively semicircular form, since the diagonal ribs, being longer, would unavoidably rise to a higher crown than the transverse ones.’*

The New York Times judged the Columbia an essential tool in a fast-moving world, and praised both its simplicity and intelligibility. It was stronger on science than literature, however, particularly when it came to biography; the articles on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne were mere skeletons of a life. The length of entries was unpredictable: Julius Caesar received 2800 words, but Napoleon only 1350; Mussolini got 850. But overall its 5 million words were a welcome addition to the reference shelf, and it was very well bound.*

The Columbia set a trend. Exacting, precise, manageable – it was once again the world in a book, but now it really was one book. To have the world explained between single covers, without multi-volume cross-referencing, was a God-like achievement.

How far could the shrinking go? It could go a lot smaller. There is something quietly absurd about the very notion of the pocket encyclopaedia, as if the world itself was suddenly considered more containable than before. Or perhaps it was an admission of defeat: the world’s knowledge was just too vast, too complex, to include in a multi-volume encyclopaedia suitable for home consumption, so instead here’s something for your backpack.

The variety of pocket editions was almost as diverse as the full-sized versions. The Wordsworth (‘An up-to-date guide to the changing world’) was arranged thematically (Society, The Arts, Science & Technology), and was aimed at an adult readership: the entry on the United Nations included individual sections on the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council and three others; NATO was given a similar breakdown.

The Hutchinson Pocket Encyclopedia was derived from its larger-scale single volume first published in 1948. It handled almost every entry at between six and twelve lines. It was hard to ascertain the relative importance of a subject when Camus was only a few lines shorter than the entire entry on Canada, and Chaos Theory received six lines next to Charlie Chaplin’s ten. When first published in 1995, everything was as important as everything else: from Aristotle to Zen, from Black Holes to Smart Weapons, from DNA to MS-DOS. One wonders what the Nobel Prize winners, listed at the back, would have thought of it all.

Richard P. Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, formulated his own logical conclusion to the shrinkage of knowledge: he offered a cash prize to anyone who could shrink it even more. In December 1959 he delivered a lecture to the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology entitled ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’. He reasoned it was now possible to take almost any usefully bulky object and make it smaller, and perhaps more useful. He wasn’t talking specifically about microchips, although he acknowledged that computers that were no longer the size of a room might one day prove beneficial. For the moment, he had an exacting challenge for his audience: to reduce a page of a book to 1/25,000 of its regular size, and then be able to read it on an electron microscope. Anyone who could do this (he used the phrase ‘any guy’) would win $1000.*

Feynman actually had more than one page in mind for his miniaturisation, and more than one book. ‘Why cannot we write the entire twenty-four volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin?’ he asked. He then examined what might be involved, beginning with the head of a pin measuring one-sixteenth of an inch across. He reasoned that all one had to do was reduce all the writing in an encyclopaedia by 25,000 times. Then he figured how it would be inscribed on to the pin. And then he concluded, ‘I don’t know why this hasn’t been done yet!’*

But of course one could go the other way with encyclopaedias. One could practically begin again, completely rethinking what a modern edition should look like. Perhaps the way forward was not shorter but longer, and more elaborate, an encyclopaedia sold on the premise that it would last forever.

* But by the time the third edition appeared in the 1960s, popular opinion and competition from its rivals forced a change of hand: forty-two pages of illustrations were added, and twenty maps, ‘without compromising what was known and loved of this admired work’, a claim which necessitated an additional 200 pages and the continued inclusion of a biography of every name in the Bible and a mention of every community in the United States with a population exceeding 1000, and almost everywhere else in the world with a population exceeding 10,000 (so just after Hernia there was Herning, a city with a population of 10,866 east of Ringkjöbing, Jutland, Denmark, a railway and trading centre).

* The finely stitched binding and durable paper was indeed a major key to its success. Almost ninety years on, and what I imagine to have been considerable use in a Wisconsin library, the volume I now own has held up remarkably well, with no loose or torn pages.

* He issued another challenge at the same time: to make a micro-motor. For the full text visit: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/47/2/1960Bottom.pdf. Professor Feynman’s love went way back: ‘We had the Encyclopaedia Britannica at home,’ he told the BBC Horizon programme in 1981. ‘Even when I was a small boy [my father] used to sit me on his lap and read to me … We would read, say, about dinosaurs, and maybe it would be talking about the brontosaurus or the tyrannosaurus rex. It would say something like, this thing is 25 feet high and the head is six feet across. And he’d stop always, and say, “Let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard he would be high enough to put his head through the window. But not quite, as the head is a little bit too wide – it would break the window as it came by.” Everything we’d read would be translated as best we could into some reality. So I’d learn to do that: everything I read I’d try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying.’

* Feynman then calculated that it would require about a million pinheads to reproduce all the books in the world, which, if laid on their side, would occupy an area of about three square yards. The $1000 prize money for the single page wasn’t claimed for twenty-five years, until a Stanford graduate named Thomas H. Newman spent a month in 1984 shrinking the first page of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. In my book In Miniature I had speculated it was the best of Times New Roman, it was the worst of Times New Roman.