Z




ZEITGEIST


This is what we knew then.

The great deceit of the encyclopaedia is that its obsolescence will necessarily render it redundant. Every generation believes its world to be changing faster than the last, and with a greater clarity of purpose, but we make a mistake if we think it necessarily contains more valuable knowledge. A fine encyclopaedia will stand you in good stead like an old wristwatch: its timing may be out, and sometimes it may not work at all, but its mechanics will always intrigue. These old volumes show us what we thought we knew, and we discard them with a rash disregard for the work of our forebears. Ancient editions carry a secret knowledge of their own, the enshrined accretion of learning. If nothing else, they are materially wonderful objects. Run your fingers down their raised spines and tell yourself you are not transported. As Albert Einstein once reported, the pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to be children all our lives.

And what of the last jagged letter? Have most compilers run out of zest? Do the strings of their hearts still go zing as the presses ready their cranks? Here are a handful of entries in the rear-view mirror, heavily truncated, loaded with distant and noble erudition. Some appear wilfully naive; many check the ‘Who Knew?’ box. I hope they show the benefit to be had from not rejecting old things just because they are not modern. When we ascend to space in a rocket we are only able to do so because of those who once paddled uncharted in canoes.


From Encyclopédie, (1751–65)

ZIMBI: Small shells that serve as everyday currency in the Kingdom of the Congo, as well as in a great number of other countries in Africa, along whose coasts they are found. We find a large quantity near an island that is opposite Luanda Saint Paolo; these are the most valued. These shells are a gold mine for the Portuguese, who hold the sole right to collect them, and that helps them purchase from Africans their most precious merchandise.


From A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Comprehending All the Branches of Human Knowledge (1763–4)

ZYTHOGALA: Beer posset, a drink recommended by [seventeenth century physician Thomas] Sydenham as good to be taken after a vomit, for allaying the acrimonious and disagreeable taste the vomit has occasioned, as well as to prevent gripes.


From Encyclopaedia Britannica, First Edition (1768–71)

ZAPATA: A kind of feast or ceremony held in Italy, in the courts of certain princes, on St Nicholas’s day; wherein people hide presents in the shoes or slippers of those they would do honour to, in such a manner as may surprise them on the morrow when they come to dress.


From Encyclopaedia Britannica, Second Edition (1777–84)

ZALEUCUS: A famous legislator of the Locrians, and the disciple of Pythagoras, flourished 500 years BC. He made a law by which he punished adulterers with the loss of both their eyes. His son offending was not absolved of this punishment, yet to show the father as well as the just law-giver, he put out his own right, and his son’s left eye. This example of justice and severity made so strong an impression on the minds of his subjects, that no instance was found of the commission of that vice during the reign of that legislator.


From Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fifth Edition, (1815)

ZEST: The woody thick skin quartering the kernel of a walnut; prescribed by some physicians, when dried and taken with white wine, as a remedy against the gravel.*


From Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1819)

ZABDA: A large and pleasant town of Syria, chiefly, if not solely, inhabited by Christians, which furnishes 700 men fit for war. The town is sheltered by mountains, but the locusts are very destructive.


From The Children’s Encyclopedia (circa 1930)

ZEPPELIN: Although his name came to be hateful to humanity, Count Ferdinand Zeppelin, born at Manzell, near Lake Constance, in 1838, must have credit for the change from the helpless balloon to the successful lighter-than-air craft. He saw he must depart entirely from the pear-shaped gas-bag which had been for a century in use, and that he must have a vessel which would not crumple up when driven against the wind. It must be rigid and steerable. So, after many trials and failures which ultimately brought him almost to beggary, he devised the famous and infamous Zeppelin. Nothing else counts in the history of steerable airships. They are as much ahead of all rivals as our ocean liners are ahead of sailing ships.


From The Columbia Encyclopedia, Single Volume (1935)

ZAHAROFF, SIR BASIL: 1850–, International financier and munitions manufacturer. Zaharoff, often called ‘The Mystery Man of Europe’ because of the secrecy surrounding his personal and business affairs, was born of Greek parents in Anatolia, Turkey. He is generally considered the greatest armament salesman the world has known. For his services to the Allies in the World War, Zaharoff was knighted by George V and decorated by the French government. He has, however, been subjected to harsh criticism on the grounds that he fomented warfare, and has been accused of exerting a baneful influence on politics by secret intrigue through his association with European statesmen, notably Lloyd George.


From Children’s Britannica (1960)

ZOO, REGENT’S PARK: In Regent’s Park many of the animals, such as lions, wolves and monkeys, are kept in cages. Many people think that wild animals roam over very large spaces and will therefore feel cramped if they are shut up in cages. As long as they have enough space to move about in, most animals seem able to live quite comfortably in cages. Some creatures seem to enjoy being looked at by visitors and play all kinds of tricks, as if they are ‘showing off’. Among these are the chimpanzees, orang-utans and gibbons, which perform acrobatics, often leaping all round the cage, or wrap themselves up in newspaper.


From Grolier Encyclopedia International (1967)

ZAHARIAS, MILDRED DIDRIKSON (‘BABE’), 1911–56: American athlete, born in Port Arthur, Tex. She was voted the outstanding woman athlete of the first half of the 20th century in an Associated Press poll. As ‘Babe’ Didrikson she distinguished herself in track and field by setting world records in the javelin throw and 80-meter hurdles in the 1932 Olympic Games. In 1938 she married the noted wrestler George Zaharias. An outstanding performer in basketball, baseball, and billiards, she later concentrated on golf. Her courageous but losing battle against cancer won the admiration of the sports-minded throughout the world.


From Encyclopaedia Judaica, First Edition, Jerusalem (1971)

ZYCHLIN: Town in Lodz province, near Kutno, central Poland. A Jewish community existed in Zychlin from the 18th century, and in 1765 there were 311 Jews paying the poll tax. About 3,500 Jews lived in Zychlin in 1939, forming approximately 50 per cent of the total population. The town fell to the German forces on Sept. 17 1939, and on the following day all the Jewish men were driven to a village 15 miles away, but after detention in a church for three days were released. In April 1940 the Polish and Jewish intellectuals, especially teachers, were arrested and deported to German concentration camps. On Purim (March 3) 1942, the [remaining] Jewish population was assembled in the market place, and 3,200 persons were loaded on carts; anyone too weak to climb up on the carts was shot on the spot. The entire Jewish population of Zychlin was thus dispatched to the Chelmno death camp and murdered.


From Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Third Edition, Macmillan (1975)

ZEN: One of the currents of Far Eastern Buddhism. The word ‘Zen’ itself is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese character transcribing the Sanskrit term dhyana (meditation, self-absorption); the Chinese pronunciation is ch’an. Zen devolved in China in the sixth and seventh centuries under the strong influence of Taoism, from which Zen borrowed the disregard for knowledge and the conviction that the truth cannot be expressed in words but can only be attained by an internal leap, freeing the consciousness not only from the beaten paths of thought but from thought in general. An idiosyncratic (vulgarized) variant of Zen flourishes among beatniks, who understand Zen as an ideology that rejects civilization.


From Encyclopaedia of the Arctic, Routledge (2005)

ZAGOSKIN, LAVRENTII ALEKSEEVICH: Russian explorer of Alaska in the 19th century. He discovered the mountain ridge between the Yukon Territory and the eastern coast of the Norton Bay, explored the Kotzebue Sound, studied the climate of Alaska, and published his meteorological data collected over this two year period. In 1848 Zagoskin retired from the Navy, and moved to the village of Ostrov, 20km outside of Moscow. Not content to retire from scientific endeavours, he planted a garden of apple trees and made daily meteorological observations studying the impact of climate on crop yield.


From Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fifteenth Edition (2007)

ZAHIR SHAH, MOHAMMAD: (b.1914) King of Afghanistan from 1933 to 1973, providing an era of stable government to his country. He undertook a number of economic development projects, including irrigation and highway construction, that were backed by foreign aid, largely from the United States and the Soviet Union. He was also able to maintain Afghanistan’s neutral position in international politics.

In a bloodless coup on July 17, 1973, Zahir Shah – who was in Italy undergoing medical treatment – was deposed. The leader of the coup, General Mohammad Daud Khan (the king’s brother-in-law), proclaimed Afghanistan a republic with himself as its president. Zahir Shah formally abdicated on Aug. 24, 1973, and remained in Italy, where he spent most of the next three decades. During that time his native home descended further and further into chaos in what came to be known as the Afghan War.


From Wikipedia (early October 2021)

ZUCKERBERG, MARK ELLIOT: (/ˈzʌkərbзːrɡ/; born May 14, 1984) is an American media magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding Facebook, Inc. and serves as its chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder.

Born in White Plains, New York, Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, where he launched the Facebook social networking service from his dormitory room on 4 February 2004, with college roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Originally launched to select college campuses, the site expanded rapidly and eventually beyond colleges, reaching one billion users by 2012. Zuckerberg took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares. In 2007, at age 23, he became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. As of October 2021, Zuckerberg’s net worth is $122 billion, making him the 5th-richest person in the world. Since 2008, Time magazine has named Zuckerberg among the 100 most influential people in the world as a part of its Person of the Year award, which he was recognized with in 2010. In December 2016, Zuckerberg was ranked 10th on Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People.*



ŻYWIEC


But human decency prevents me from giving Zuckerberg the last word. Instead, the last word – because it is the last word to appear in the last printed edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica in 2010, the unwitting final stop (a conclusion even) of a journey lasting hundreds of years – is Żywiec, a town on the Sola River in south central Poland in the Carpathian Mountains near the Czech and Slovak borders. The town was first chronicled in the fourteenth century, and is a popular tourist centre, being home to a church containing the ‘Dormant Virgin’. It is also known for its large breweries and the estimated population in 1982 was 28,800.

Żywiec exists on Wikipedia too, where it gets more than the fourteen lines devoted to it in Britannica. Many thousands of useful words more. By the end of June 2019 its population had grown to 31,194. There is a history of its churches, of its role in the first partition of Poland in 1772, and about its fate in the two world wars. There is geographic and demographic information, and one learns that although between 1975 and 1998 it was located within the Bielsko-Biała Voivodeship, it has since become part of the Silesian Voivodeship. There are men’s and women’s football teams in the town, and the main brewery is now owned by Heineken.

Wikipedia also has several colour photographs of Żywiec, and the one of the town hall ought to be in a Wes Anderson movie. Should you wish to corroborate the information or find out more there are sixteen references to sources and many hyperlinks. Notable people born or connected with Żywiec include the former IBO cruiserweight champion Tomasz Adamek, the Poland international footballer Tomasz Jodłowiec, and Tadeusz Wrona, a pilot who successfully performed a belly landing of a Boeing 767 during LOT Polish Airlines Flight 16 at the Chopin Airport in Warsaw on 1 November 2011, and so smoothly did he do it that none of the 231 passengers and crew hurt as much as a hair.

When I accessed this information on 7 October 2021, there was a blue box with white type above it:

Please don’t scroll past this.

This Thursday, for the 1st time recently, we humbly ask you to defend Wikipedia’s independence. 98% of our readers don’t give; they simply look the other way. If you are an exceptional reader who has already donated, we sincerely thank you. If you donate just £2, or whatever you can this Thursday, Wikipedia could keep thriving for years. Most people donate because Wikipedia is useful. If Wikipedia has given you £2 worth of knowledge this year, take a minute to donate.

Show the world that access to reliable, neutral information matters to you.

Thank you.

The pedant in me balked at the use of ‘1st’ for ‘first’, but I donated £12, the price of a set of Britannica at the end of the eighteenth century. I couldn’t think of anything that provided better value.

I hope this book has encouraged you to think twice about throwing out an old set of encyclopaedias, of whatever vintage, of whatever quality. I hope it may even encourage you to rescue a set from a charity shop, or AbeBooks or eBay.

But be quick, as I may beat you to it. In September 2021 I went back to eBay to look for a set of The Children’s Encyclopaedia, the volumes I had first taken off the shelves at school fifty years before. There were a lot of copies – blue bindings, brown bindings, single volumes and complete ten-volume sets. One complete set in readable condition from the 1930s requested an opening bid of £3.50, and after a week it had attracted no interest. So I paid the minimum, and almost triple that for postage, and a large parcel arrived in a battered box after five working days. I imagined it had been thrown into the back of a lorry the way one chucks large objects into skips at dumps.

The volumes were a little lighter than I remembered, but not much. How could my ten-year-old hands have handled such things? They smelt of, yes, school. A few images were instantly familiar: the opening plate showing a dapper young Shakespeare reading to a bored Anne Hathaway; a large gathering of the world’s children in national dress (‘Your Little Friends in Other Lands’), a depiction so well meaning and so wholly offensive – naked ‘Hottentots’, inscrutable Chinese – that to reprint it today would land you in scalding water.

It wasn’t just a nostalgia trip for me, it was a learning trip. I can only confirm the old adage that education is wasted on the young. Did you know, for example, why we hear better on water than land? Or why some people have dimples? And does iron get heavier when it rusts? I found it diverting, hilarious, surprising.

Equally surprising was the discovery that new junior encyclopaedias were still being published in heavy print. In 2020 Britannica launched a new single-volume, full-colour, punchily designed edition called Children’s Encyclopaedia (in the UK) and Kids’ Encyclopaedia (in the US). Its editor Christopher Lloyd wrote something unusual in his introduction, something few editors of encyclopaedias had mentioned before: he admitted there was a lot he didn’t know. The known unknowns, he suggested, might be as interesting as anything else, for they were the inspiration for future generations (and future editions). He hoped that an enquiring mind rewarded in an orderly way – and is this not the best value of an encyclopaedia yet produced, even at this late hour? – would prove to be a reliable and satisfying alternative to the maelstrom online.

I learnt a lot. A nebula cloud the size of Earth only weighed as much as a small sack of potatoes. I read how crystals form. I discovered that the oldest living things on earth were the Great Basin bristlecone pines in the Rocky Mountains (around 5000 years). I questioned the statement that a human being can make more than 10,000 different faces, and wondered how one measured them. I was disappointed to find that the Bugatti La Voiture Noire hypercar would cost me $18.7 million. And I regained my faith in human ingenuity when I saw that the first artificial kidneys were adapted from washing machines. A lot of these were the sort of hey-wow factoids I had learnt to distrust as an adult, substitutes for deeper learning. But they made the child in me want to know more.

The book joined the unsteady piles of encyclopaedias to the left of my desk. I counted eighty-seven volumes in all, a wildfire of information. The whole spinning world continues to revolve in those pages, pungently outmoded as they are. And to handle just one of those books is to be transported to a place of dedication and expertise, and often to obscurity, and occasionally to genius. I’m saddened that the world no longer has a use for most of them, and that this remarkable corner of history is history itself.

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