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

Further Reading

The following guide to further reading contains one glaring omission: encyclopaedias. I’ve written about so many intriguing possibilities, and it would be superfluous to list them all again here.

I have attempted to record the sources of my own knowledge in the footnotes, particularly the valuable contributions from academic journals. The following books go into greater detail about much of the history and debating points I’ve discussed in the previous pages. All have proved invaluable in my research.

Arnar, Anna, Encyclopedism from Pliny to Borges (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 1990)

Arner, Robert D., Dobson’s Encyclopaedia: The Publisher, Text, and Publication of America’s First Britannica, 1789–1803 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991)

Barney, Stephen et al., eds, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Blair, Ann, Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021)

Blair, Ann, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010)

Boyles, Denis, Everything Explained That Is Explainable: On the Creation of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Celebrated Eleventh Edition, 1910–11 (New York: Knopf, 2016)

Broughton, John, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual (Beijing;

Cambridge: O’Reilly Media, 2008)

Burke, Peter, A Social History of Knowledge: from Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, 2000)

Burke, Peter, A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia (Cambridge: Polity, 2012)

Collison, Robert, Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout the Ages (New York: Hafner, 1964)

Cooper, Helen, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (London: Duckworth, 1983)

Courtney, Janet Elizabeth Hogarth, Recollected in Tranquillity (London: William Heinemann, 1926)

Darnton, Robert, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979)

Einbinder, Harvey, The Myth of the Britannica (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964)

Evans, Philip and Wurster, Thomas S., Blown to Bits (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2000)

Hankins, John Erskine, Background of Shakespeare’s Thought (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978)

Jacobs, A.J., The Know-It-All (London: William Heinemann, 2005)

Kafker, Frank and Loveland, Jeff, The Early Britannica (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009)

Kafker, Frank and Serena, The Encyclopedists as Individuals (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988)

Kister, Kenneth F., Kister’s Best Encyclopaedias (Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press, 1994)

Kogan, Herman, The Great EB (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)

König, Jason and Woolf, Greg, eds, Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Lih, Andrew, The Wikipedia Revolution (London: Aurum Press, 2009)

Lough, John, Essays on the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert (London: Oxford University Press, 1968)

Loveland, Jeff, The European Encyclopedia: From 1650 to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Lynch, Jack, You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf from Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016)

McHenry, Robert, How to Know (New Delhi: Corner Bookstore, 2005)

Murphy, James W., Who Says You Can’t Sell Ice to Eskimos? (CreateSpace/Amazon, California, 2013)

Rosengard, Peter, Talking to Strangers: The Adventures of a Life Insurance Salesman (London: Coptic, 2013)

Salecl, Renata, A Passion for Ignorance: What We Choose Not to Know and Why (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)

Smith, Reginald A., Towards a Living Encyclopaedia: A Contribution to Mr. Wells’s New Encyclopaedism (London: Andrew Dakars, 1941)

Thomas, Gillian, A Position to Command Respect: Women and the Eleventh Britannica (Metuchen, N.J.; London: Scarecrow Press, 1992)

Wells, H.G., World Brain (London: Methuen & Co, 1938)

Wilson, Arthur McCandless, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972)

Wright, Alex, Cataloguing the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)