A
AAH, HERE COMES ANDREW BELL
That’s what they said when he approached.
Andrew Bell was a novelty to himself and a wonder to others. He was born in Edinburgh in 1726, and achieved many things in his life, but nothing was as great as his great and extraordinary nose.
His wasn’t an averagely large nose, or even a very large nose. His was a nose that won rosettes, and you could pin the rosette on his nose and he’d hardly notice, such was its pocked and fleshy expanse. It was the size of an avocado. It made the proboscis monkey look like Audrey Hepburn. When people met him they found it impossible to look away, such was its implausibility.
When historians wrote of Andrew Bell long after his death they recalled ‘a spry fellow of unusual appearance’. The American writer Herman Kogan noted in 1958 how ‘He stood four and a half feet tall and had an enormous nose and crooked legs’. His nose was so large that its owner made fun of it himself. According to Kogan, when guests stared or pointed to his nose at parties, Bell would disappear, only to reappear with an even larger nose made of papier-mâché. His nose became the subject of academic interest. The scholars Frank A. Kafker and Jeff Loveland, writing in a publication of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford, observed in 2009 that Bell’s nose rendered him ‘grotesque’. An appreciation of Bell’s career as an engraver by Ann Gunn in the Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History (vol. 22, 2017–18) mentions not only his nose, but also his appearance in etchings by the caricaturist John Kay. One of these shows him side-on, talking to a colleague, his knock-kneed legs forming a triangle from his knees, his face with a baking potato where his nose should be.
A spry fellow of unusual appearance: Andrew Bell and colleague compare profiles
But Andrew Bell’s entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica makes no mention of it. Presumably this is out of politeness, for Bell’s other claim to posterity beyond his outstanding appearance was his key role in Britannica’s formation. He contributed more than 500 engravings to the first four editions, and for the last sixteen years of his life he was sole owner of one of the greatest publishing achievements of his age. Bell and his co-founder conceived a work of accumulated learning so wide in its scope and so lasting in its significance that Britannica – ‘the great EB’ – is the first name most people associate with the word ‘encyclopaedia’. Launched in 1768, it was far from the first, and obviously far from the last. It emerged in what was certainly the golden age of encyclopaedias: the eighteenth century produced at least fifty sets in Great Britain, France, Germany, the Low Countries and Italy. Fifty!
In English the Britannica was the figurehead, the watershed and the gold standard. It proved itself and improved itself over many editions, hundreds of printings and hundreds of thousands of articles. Its contributors were revered and its words were trusted, so much so that when Wikipedia launched in 2001, it plundered huge amounts of Britannica’s (out-of-copyright) eleventh edition as its core knowledge base. Wikipedia currently mentions not only Bell’s achievement as an encyclopaedist and possessor of a not-small nose, but also carries a sketch of a tiny man riding around Edinburgh on a huge horse, with a ladder brought for his mount and dismount, forever cheered on by a crowd delighting in his fearless ambition.
ACCUMULATION
Andrew Bell’s involvement was artistic and inspirational; by contrast, the role of his colleague Colin Macfarquhar, a printer in Nicolson Street near the University of Edinburgh, was businesslike and practical. Both men appreciated the money that a groundbreaking new publishing enterprise might accrue. We shall see how the principles of the ancient Chinese or Greek encyclopaedias did not share these considerations: theirs was a philosophical concern, usually founded on privilege and social class. But by the 1750s, knowledge, or at least the accumulation of information, was seen as a marketable commodity, as saleable as cotton and tin. This principle wouldn’t be reversed for more than 200 years, and not until the emergence of the Internet would it be seriously challenged. For Bell and Macfarquhar, the collation and summation of the world’s practical thinking into a few manageable volumes presented nothing so much as an opportunity of trade. One could view it more radically still, as a bourgeois accumulation of goods – intellectual property – to be obtained, ordained and refigured, and then sent on its way again at a profit.
Bell was not a wealthy man; when he wasn’t carving copperplate illustrations for books he was engraving dog collars. Macfarquhar was the son of a wig maker, and his printing works faced such strong competition that he had developed a reputation for the piratical. He had been fined for the unauthorised printing of a Bible and Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son. One may assume his financial affairs received advantageous guidance after he married the daughter of a Glaswegian accountant in 1767, the same year he was honoured as a master printer.
Together Bell and Macfarquhar announced their intentions: a weekly part-work in 100 instalments, sold initially from Macfarquhar’s printworks, each twenty-four-page instalment (or ‘number’, or ‘fascicle’) costing 6d on ordinary paper and 8d on more refined stock. Every week would see an advancing accretion of letters until the instalments were compiled into three volumes, and the volumes were compiled into a set. The first volume ran from Aa to Bzo, ‘a town of Africa, in the kingdom of Morocco’. The second covered Caaba to Lythrum, while the third stretched from Macao to Zyglophyllum.* The second and third volumes contained significantly shorter entries, or at least distinctly fewer long ones. The page size was quarto and the typeface was small. The enterprise, in double-columned text we might now regard as 8-point, and sometimes 6-point, benefitted from the application of a magnifying glass (not supplied), especially if a reader hoped to tackle all of its 2391 pages. The first complete leather-bound set was published in August 1771 at a cost of £2 and 10 shillings on plain paper and £3 and 7 shillings on finer. The number of its pre-publication subscribers is not known, but after moving its sales efforts to the bookshops of London it sold its entire 3000 print run within a few months.
Who had written and compiled this magnificent thing? Almost certainly the same people who bought it. Collectively they were known as ‘A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland’ and their names appear at the beginning of the first edition. It’s a list of more than 100 experts and authors, a small handful of whom were direct contributors. Most of the names were simply sources, the authors of books filleted and condensed for a fresh purpose. The titles were arcane, at least to us today: Bielfield’s Universal Erudition, Calmet’s Dictionary of the Bible, Cotes’s Hydrostatical Lectures and Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica. Then there was Priestley’s History of Electricity and Macquer’s Chemistry. The use of the authors’ surnames suggests a long-standing familiarity with the standard text, in the vein of Gray’s Anatomy; the full and correct title of Pierre-Joseph Macquer’s textbook (translated into English from the French and published in Edinburgh five years earlier) was Elements of the Theory and Practice of Chymistry (the author was a Parisian chemist). These works underlined one of the Britannica’s prime objectives: the accumulation in one publication of the key titles one might expect to find in a university library.
But the precise content of the first Encyclopaedia Britannica was ultimately the responsibility of one man, its principal editor William Smellie. Perhaps it was inevitable that a man with an enormous nose would engage a man with such a surname, but Smellie also possessed other attributes. He appears to have been rescued from a possible life of debauchery and alcoholism by the twin redemptive forces of education and remuneration. He was a Presbyterian with much experience of proofreading, editing and printing, while his regular attendance at a wide variety of classes at Edinburgh University had rendered him a polymath, and he became an expert in bees and plant sexuality, the telescope and the microscope, and botany. Bell and Macfarquhar paid him £200 for four years’ work, his contract demanding Smellie oversee the entire publication and compose fifteen articles on ‘capital sciences’, which included, in the first volume alone, lengthy entries on anatomy and astronomy.
In his preface to the first edition, William Smellie claimed his ‘professed design’ was to ‘diffuse the knowledge of science’. To this end he and his compilers had ‘extracted the useful parts’ of many books, ‘and rejected whatever appeared trifling or less interesting’. In other words: astute editing.
The historian Herman Kogan found Smellie a ‘roisterer’, ‘as devoted to whiskey as to scholarship’. He was fond of reciting his father’s ‘tedious’ poems in Latin. At the age of twenty-eight he already had many literary friends and connections, rendering him something of an intellectual show-off. There may have been no individual in the whole of the British Isles better suited to marshalling such an august and high-reaching publication.
Despite his own modest status (his father was a builder), Smellie held a generally elitist view of his fellow beings. In his entry on Mythology, he suggested ‘common people were prone to superstition’ and ‘born to be deceived in everything’. Ignoring for a moment his Scottish environs, he believed that ‘people of distinction’ tended to live in London. His employment was intended initially as a part-time occupation, but it entirely consumed him.
It is not certain precisely how much of the first edition was written by Smellie himself, nor how much was created anew by his band of gentlemen scholars. All the articles went uncredited. ‘I wrote most of it, my lad,’ Smellie announced facetiously in his later years, ‘and snipped out from books enough material for the printer. With pastepot and scissors I composed it!’
Agriculture spanned thirty pages (‘Agriculture is an art of such consequence to mankind, that their very existence, especially in a state of society, depends upon it.’) Algebra occupied thirty-eight pages (‘A general method of computation by certain signs and symbols, which have been contrived for this purpose, and found convenient’). Medicine ran to 110 pages, with much on gout, quinsy and other agues, but it did not cover Midwifery, which merited its own forty-six-page entry, providing a step-by-step guide that assumed to eliminate the need for training and experience. The accompanying three pages of highly detailed anatomical engravings outraged many, not least churchmen, who urged readers to tear them out and burn them.