Introduction







On Friday, 4 June 2021, I made peterhodgson1959 an offer for his encyclopaedias. He was selling what he described on eBay as ‘Encyclopedia britannica pre-assembly suppliment set 4th, 5th & 6th editions’. Seven tall volumes, condition ‘acceptable’. They dated from 1815 to 1824, with articles on acoustics, aeronautics and Spain. I was intrigued by the prospect of a twenty-nine-page entry on Chivalry, and frightened by the forty-page treatise on Equations. I hoped to learn what 1819 knew about Egypt, and what 1824 understood about James Watt.

peterhodgson1959 had set the opening bid at £44, which I liked for its randomness. I offered him £50 to end the auction a few days early and was delighted when he agreed. Peter told me he had owned the books for about twelve years. ‘For some reason’ he had decided to obtain a set of each of Britannica’s fifteen monumental editions spanning 1768–2010, several hundreds of volumes and hundreds of millions of words. But now he was downsizing his home, and evaluating his reasoning, and things had to go.

My seven supplementary volumes arrived via UPS four days later. ‘Acceptable’ may have been better described as ‘flaky’ or even ‘deplorable’, because they were foxed, water-stained, falling apart and they smelt of armpit, but they were still wholly legible and fascinating, and more than acceptable to me.

They were additionally acceptable because all but one of the opening pages carried the elegant signature of P.M. Roget. Peter Mark Roget, a well-regarded physician and active Fellow of the Royal Society, had not only found time between teaching and surgery to purchase the greatest encyclopaedia of his age, but also, in his late thirties, to contribute regular articles. At the front of Volume 1 he had written a list of his entries: Ant, Apiary, Bee, Cranioscopy, Deaf & Dumb, Kaleidoscope and Physiology.

From Ant to Physiology: Roget’s Britannica and a list of his contributions

And of course he had found time for something else, for while he was writing his Britannica entries he was also writing/composing/compiling/producing/penning his Thesaurus. I was enchanted by the conflation of these two great reference works, both of which I’d consulted all my life. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been: Roget’s fellow contributors to my Supplements included Walter Scott, William Hazlitt and Robert Stevenson.*

A few weeks later I came across another set of Britannica, in the basement of Henry Pordes Books in Charing Cross Road. They were just there, in a row on the floor, kickable. It took a bit of effort to crouch down, ease one volume from the pile of other reference books above it (the Australian Encyclopaedia, the Encyclopaedia of Restoration Comedy), and bring it up to a level where it could be identified as Volume 11 of the 1951 London printing of the fourteenth edition (twenty-five volumes, 38 million words, 17,000 illustrations, slippery black faux-leather binding, gold embossed lettering, nine-hole side-stitching, whiff of tobacco and fish). Once I was upright the volume was tricky to hold – large, heavy and unwieldy, all the things one hopes an encyclopaedia will be, always suggestive of a proper bounty.

Volume 11 (Gunn to Hydrox), contained, in very small print, important information about the herring, the herringbone pattern and homosexuality. This edition, launched in 1929 and updated every few years, had four founding aims: to promote international understanding; to strengthen the bonds between English-speaking peoples; to encourage interest in and support for science; and to sum up the ideas of the age for future generations. It contained original articles by Alfred Hitchcock (Motion Pictures), Linus Pauling (Ice; the Theory of Resonance), Edward Weston (Photographic Art), Margaret Mead (Child Psychology), J.B. Priestley (English Literature), Jonas Salk (Infantile Paralysis), J. Edgar Hoover (FBI), Harold Laski (Bolshevism), Konstantin Stanislavsky (Theatre Directing and Acting), Helen Wills (Lawn Tennis) and Orville Wright (Wilbur Wright). What a line-up! The articles on flying and homosexuality would now be considered off-beam, to say the least.

The week after I bought Peter Hodgson’s nineteenth-century supplements, I went on eBay again. I was becoming hooked on old knowledge – and how cheap it was. A seller called 2011123okay from Haywards Heath was willing to part with a complete nineteen-volume Children’s Britannica from 1993 for 99p. Davidf7327 from Buckfastleigh was selling a twenty-six-volume 1968 Britannica (with yearbook and atlas) for £1. And cosmicmanallan from the Rhymney Valley offered a twenty-four-volume set of the fourteenth edition, condition good, for £3. There was a lot of talk in the papers at the time of how we were all searching for certainty in our lives: amid Covid-19 and disruptive social change, we yearned for an element of stability and control – something trustworthy and authentic, the reliable pre-pandemic world in reliable physical form. Not the case with encyclopaedias, it seemed; not if the items on eBay were anything to go by.

Someone calling themselves thelittleradish was selling the complete fifteenth edition, the last in the line, originally published in 1974, thirty-four volumes including yearbooks. This particular set was last updated in 1988, and they were in near-perfect condition. The starting price of the auction was £15. I thought they might reach £30 or £40. But no one else wanted them, so the set was mine for £15, which was obviously incredible considering that it contained the work of around 4000 authors from more than 100 countries. And these authors weren’t just random people. They were experts, PhD people, men and women who had not only attained excellence in their specialisms, but were able to share their knowledge with others, with me. According to Britannica’s own account, the editorial creation of this work cost $32 million, exclusive of printing costs, which made it the largest single private investment in publishing history. And the price now – 44p a volume, less than the cost of a Mars bar – made it the best value education one could possibly buy, and the fastest depreciating assemblage of information ever known. If the market assigned true worth, then the stock in encyclopaedias had tumbled into the basement, if not back into the soil.

Of course, I had to add petrol to that. I drove down to Cambridge – Cambridge! – to collect the set in my seething Toyota (Cambridge University Press had published Britannica in its heyday at the beginning of the twentieth century). thelittleradish turned out to be a thirty-two-year-old named Emily, who was not particularly little and lived in Sawston, about seven miles from the city centre, and she joked that the extra weight I was about to load into my car was nothing, for she’d just had to carry all the books down the stairs. They were waiting for me in the front room, six piles spread across one wall, and as I shifted four books at a time into my boot, and then my back seats, and then my front seat, Emily apologised for the possible scatter of cat hair.

Emily told me she had never actually consulted any of the volumes herself. During my drive to her home I assumed she’d inherited the set from a recently departed parent or grandparent, and their value to her wasn’t justifying the space they were taking up, and her loss would be my gain. But no: she had a side hustle buying and selling on eBay, usually selling for more than she bought. Not this time. She had bought the set three months ago from someone who said his children had used them all through school, and now that they were young adults he had no use for them any more. She didn’t want me to reveal how much she’d paid for them, but it’s safe to say she wouldn’t be buying any more sets for profit. As we’d both just experienced, an old encyclopaedia was about as popular as a burst balloon. Emily’s young daughter toddled through from the kitchen. ‘You don’t want to keep these for her?’ I asked her mother, but I had already guessed her reply.

The great set from thelittleradish in Cambridge joined three other sets in my study. Two were from my childhood: the first, shared with my brother, who received it as a bar mitzvah gift, was the Everyman. Launched by J.M. Dent & Sons in 1913, my fifth edition from 1967 contained 4000 illustrations and 8 million words. The jacket flap promised nearly 50,000 articles ‘easily and lucidly written … the care given to the whole production is meticulous … the ideal encyclopaedia … handsome but not too bulky … detailed and comprehensive but not too voluminous … the lowest priced major encyclopaedia in the English language is incomparable value for discerning purchasers.’ It had cost someone only £28 for twelve volumes, and for that I got everything I needed to understand everything around me. There was a huge confusing universe out there, and a child of eight who wasn’t even allowed to go to school alone on a bus could easily feel overwhelmed by it. But now that universe had come to me in twelve alphabetical volumes. I would never need another book again; the concept of school was suddenly outmoded, except for sports. And if I did still have to go to school, the encyclopaedias would be useful for an additional reason: teachers and examiners could always tell how much of one’s schoolwork had been lifted from Britannica, but I was confident that a more obscure publication would be harder to detect. Alas, as its title implied, the Everyman was more popular than I suspected.

In my younger days, what I really liked were the spine codes. Or at least I thought of them as codes, those alphabetical guides to each volume, the Bang to Breed, Chaffinch to Colour, Dachshund to Dropsy, Xerxes to Zyfflich. The encyclopaedist’s official name for these codes was ‘catch titles’, which didn’t at all rule out a secret resonance. They were a cipher, surely, ushering in something big, something final. Aliens? Critical answers in exams? Perhaps in the far future women with huge foreheads from Amazing Worlds would explain them all, although by then we would be their captives. If encyclopaedias were the ultimate gathering of knowledge, then the spine codes had to be the ultimate refinement of this, the filtered pure essence of deep learning. In other words, the Enlightenment. Transcendence. The Truth. Dachshund to Dropsy.*

Over the years, I occasionally thought of the set I had consulted at school. (‘Consulted’ is probably too polite a word; between the ages of seven and thirteen, the collection in the school library was mostly used for tracing and tittering. Inevitably, we scoured it for rude biology and pictures of Amazonian tribes.) The Children’s Encyclopaedia was ten volumes, quite a formidable carry, lithographic colour, seemingly endless amounts of texts on the subject of knights. It was edited by a man called Arthur Mee, and the trinity of beliefs deeply embedded within his writing – God, England, Empire – must have left quite a dent in our minds.

In the early 1970s my parents had invested in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, which occupied a large part of my father’s study for thirty years, and has since taken up residence in the Hampshire home of my parents-in-law, where even if it is rarely consulted, it certainly looks proud in its blue and gold binding.

Then there was a 1973 printing of Britannica, an updated version of the fourteenth edition, which pulled up in my septuagenarian father-in-law’s car about ten years ago. He couldn’t see the use for them any more, now that all the information appeared to be inside his computer. He had a point, of course: any factual disputes could be settled far more quickly online, exposing the printed volumes as outdated at best, and inadvertently offensive at worst. And they were woefully insubstantial on the Munich Olympics and Pink Floyd. But I certainly couldn’t bear to part with them: scholarship of any era is still scholarship. So for a while they sat beneath a table supporting my iMac, and they never once groaned at the irony. For someone whose entire working life has been based on the accumulation and elucidation of information, a good encyclopaedia will always be the historical backbone of broad knowledge – familiar, unshowy, faithful, exact. Yes, they’re unwoke, and yes my attraction to them is rooted in musty nostalgia, and even though I may not consult them as much as I did, just knowing they may be consulted I find as comforting as an uncut cake.

Many encyclopaedias had passed through my hands over the course of my life. The only thing my current burgeoning collection couldn’t teach me was how to know when enough domestic encyclopaedias was enough domestic encyclopaedias.

And then the inevitable happened. Cambridgebaglady listed a complete set of the 1997 Britannica for 1p. I looked at my screen again: it really was £0.01. The seller described the books as ‘pristine’. There was even a bonus book, Science and the Future, predicting everything but the demise of the encyclopaedia. The item was ‘collection in person only’, and all thirty-five volumes were in south-east Cornwall. (Quite beautifully, for something on which I could spend a penny, they were in Looe.) Would the 500-mile round trip be worthwhile? Could I pick up the books during a Cornish holiday? Did I really need these volumes, cheap and pristine as they were? Yes, yes, and no/yes.

What had happened to this brilliant world? How had something so rich in content and inestimable in value become so redundant? Why were so many people giving these wonderful things away for almost nothing? I knew the answers, of course: digitisation, the search engine, social media, Wikipedia. The world was moving on, and access to knowledge was becoming faster and cheaper. But I also knew that information was not the same as wisdom, any more than the semiconductor was the same as the turbine. And I was fairly certain that relinquishing so much accumulated knowledge so dismissively was unlikely to signal good things. At a time when researchers at MIT had found that fake news spread six times faster on social media than factual news (whatever that is), and when false information made tech companies much more money than the truth (whatever that is), we should necessarily ask whom we can trust. Despite its numerous and inevitable errors, I have always trusted the intentions of the printed encyclopaedia and its editors. That we don’t have the space in our homes (and increasingly our libraries) for a big set of books suggests a new set of priorities; depth yielding to the shallows. The process of making an encyclopaedia informs the worth we place on its contents, and to neglect this worth is to welcome a form of cultural amnesia.

This book is as much about the value of considered learning as it is about encyclopaedias themselves. It is about the vast commitment required to make those volumes – an astonishing energy force – and the belief that such a thing will be worthwhile. Those who bought them did so in the hope of purchasing perennial value. An encyclopaedia is a publishing achievement like no other, and something worth celebrating in almost every manifestation.

As I spent more time with the old volumes at the London Library, and bought more from eBay, I wondered about the collective noun. An academy of encyclopaedias? A wisdom or diligence? Alas, increasingly an overload and a burden. It is the task of this book to correct this perception.

Like an old atlas, old encyclopaedias tell us what we knew then. Not so long ago – just before we all got computers in fact – they did more than any other single thing to shape our understanding of the world. It is no surprise that many of the greatest minds contributed to their success, from Newton and Babbage to Swinburne and Shaw, from Alexander Fleming and Ernest Rutherford to Niels Bohr and Marie Curie. Leon Trotsky wrote about Lenin. Lillian Gish considered motion pictures. Nancy Mitford courted Madame de Pompadour. W.E.B. Du Bois summarised ‘Negro Literature’. Tenzing Norgay tackled Mount Everest.

And it should be no less surprising that our encyclopaedic story has a role for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Coleridge, Voltaire, Rousseau, Flaubert and the founding fathers of the United States. The role of women in this saga went underappreciated until the eleventh edition of Britannica in 1910; only with the leadership of Wikipedia has this markedly improved.

After I had decided to write about encyclopaedias I fell under their spell once more. And I found them everywhere. I read Thomas Savage’s magnificent The Power of the Dog when the film came out, and discovered that the malevolent Phil Burbank had learnt chess from a ‘C’ volume a century ago; I read the celebratory tributes to Alice Munro on her ninetieth birthday, all of which mentioned Lives of Girls and Women, her book with that rare thing, a mother flogging encyclopaedias to local farmers; I read Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, with young Elwood Curtis winning what he thought was a complete set of Fisher’s Universal Encyclopedia in a competition, only to find that all but the first volume were blank (he still wowed them at school when the Aegean and Archimedes came up).

And then I turned on the television. Streaming on Apple TV+ was a series based on Isaac Asimov’s futuristic Foundation trilogy, in which almost 150,000 ‘scientists’ had been toiling in a distant galaxy for more than half a century to write Encyclopedia Galactica, containing all the knowledge in the world and the worlds beyond. (Only later do we find the project to be a fraud, an invention to keep the cleverest minds occupied while their fellow citizens are forced to surrender their free will by a new fascist regime. But you probably saw that coming.) There is, possibly, a moral here, or maybe three: too long in ivory towers will blind you to the real terrors of the world; fifty-five years spent on producing the first volume of anything is probably excessive; the attempt to capture the definitive sum of all human knowledge in one place – ever looking back, seldom looking forward – may, after all is said and done, be a wholly fruitless enterprise. As someone explains early on, working on an encyclopaedia ‘Is all very interesting … but it seems a strange occupation for grown men.’*

Of course there was a reason for this ubiquity: encyclopaedias were once as common as cars. Attracting both esteem and derision, they occupied the literature because they occupied the life – the weighty backdrop to an intelligent discourse, the stern status symbol on the shelf, a reliable target of satire. I’ve come to rob your house, a man tells a woman on her doorstep in the first series of Monty Python. Well OK, she replies, just as long as you’re not selling encyclopaedias.

The printed Britannica is printed no more, but it exists as myth, as plagiarised schoolboy homework, as parental guilt-ridden purchase, as a salesman’s silver-tongued wile, as evidence of a ridiculously bold publishing endeavour, and as a mirror to the extraordinary growth of cultured civilisations.

This is not an encyclopaedia of encyclopaedias; it is not a catalogue or analysis of every set in the world, just those I judge the most significant or interesting, or indicative of a turning point in how we view the world. The only mention of the American Educator Encyclopaedia and Dunlop’s Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Facts, for example, has just occurred. If your favourite is Johann Heinrich Alsted’s Encyclopaedia Septem Tomis Distincta of 1630, I can only apologise for its absence. Specialist guides are also missing – the Encyclopaedia of Adoption, say, and the Christopher Columbus Encyclopaedia, brilliant as they both might be. No room either for the Encyclopaedia of World Crime (six volumes, Marshall Cavendish, 1990), or even the Concise Encyclopaedia of Traffic and Transport Systems (Pergamon Press, 1991, $410). If you live in the Netherlands, I hope you already know all about the Grote Winkler Prins Encyclopedie (twenty-six volumes, Elsevier 1985–93). Almanacs and catalogues of miscellany – astrological charts, lists of capital cities, seasonal gardening tips – are also excluded. I was tempted to include the Pragmatics Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2010, £125), but I took the pragmatic approach myself, reasoning that the fact it was possible to compile entries on ‘implicative, deixis, presupposition, morphopragmatics, the semantics-pragmatics, syntax-pragmatics and prosody-pragmatics interfaces’ was probably knowledge enough.

But I am happy, in passing, to include a few outliers in this book, including the three-volume Encyclopedia of the Arctic (Routledge, 2005), the nineteen-volume New Catholic Encyclopedia (Catholic University of America, 1995) and the thirty-two-volume Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Moscow, 1970; New York, 1975), the latter of particular interest for its subject choices, many of which have both lost and gained something in translation from the Cyrillic.*

My history focuses on the West, on the great European and American tradition. Chinese and South American volumes get a look-in along the way, but they are exceptions in my attempt to record not just the monumental achievements of encyclopaedias as objects, and the admirable if sometimes maniacal ambitions of their compilers, but to set these objects within the framework of Western knowledge-building. They were as much a part of the Enlightenment as they were the Digital Revolution. I’d be missing a trick if my book wasn’t in alphabetical order, and with the exception of the letter A, it will follow a vaguely chronological pattern. I count myself fortunate that Britannica was first published near the beginning, and Wikipedia was launched near the end.

I didn’t buy the books in Looe. Not merely because Looe was a step too far; but because spending 1p on thirty-five volumes would have been obscene, and unforgivably insulting to the notion of intelligence.

I began to wonder what a set of unwanted encyclopaedias cheaper than firewood says about the value we place on information and its history, particularly at a time increasingly decried as rootless and unstable. Perhaps the story will help us understand ourselves a little better, not least our estimation of what’s worth knowing in our lives, and what’s worth keeping.*




* There was also an entry by David Ricardo on Money. Ricardo was one of the few contributors to Britannica to have refused payment on the grounds that his article wasn’t good enough to merit it.

* Sometimes the codes revealed more obvious and natural connections, particularly for younger readers. Volume 2 of the 1976 edition of Britannica Junior, for example, had the catch title ‘Animal to Bacon’.

* It made me think of Douglas Adams, who once observed that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had already supplanted Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all wisdom, for although it had many omissions and contained much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scored over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly, it had the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.

* Who would want to miss Additional Penal Measures, Apartment House, Auxiliary Gearbox, Batman, Childrens’ Excursion Tour Station, Cleavage, Daily Milking Block, Decontamination (nuclear agents), Danube Cossack Host, and Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling Masses and Exploited People? Astonishingly, these are all in the first third of Volume 8. For those wondering whether Cleavage and Daily Milking Block are connected, I am happy to report they are not, and that Cleavage is defined as ‘a series of successive divisions of an egg into increasingly smaller cells’, while Discoidal Cleavage is the same, but refers specifically to those animals – scorpions, certain types of molluscs – producing eggs with a much more dominant yolk.

* The dilemma of the diphthong. Unless specifically indicated in a book title, I’ve kept to the original spelling of encyclopaedia, rather than encyclopedia. Likewise with the venerable job description of encyclopaedist. But so as not to appear archaic I have decided against encyclopædia. I am aware that this footnote will be completely unintelligible in the audio version of this book.

Загрузка...