‘A large work is difficult because it is large.’

Samuel Johnson, Preface to

A Dictionary of the English Language

, 1755


‘Books can be useful from so many points of view. In my early days, for example, I used to use the

Encyclopaedia Britannica

as a trouser-press, and certainly the house that was without it was to be pitied.’

Ford Madox Ford, letter to the

Philadelphia Inquirer

, September 1929


‘This great mass of human knowledge – so vast in its range that not even its editors can hope to read all through the complete work.’

BBC News report on the fourteenth edition of

Encyclopaedia Britannica

, 1951

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