For Justine
Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Introduction
Aah, Here Comes Andrew Bell
Backstory
Chalcenterocity
Damask Silk
Ephraim Chambers (Gentleman)
Fabuleux!
Germination
Hamilton’s Choice
Information Overload
Jahrbuch
Knowledge
Liberation?
Method
Novelties
Otlet, Paul
Pantology
Questioning
Rule Britannica?
Selling
The Single Volume
Unprecedented
Valedictory
Wikimania
Extinction
Yesterday
Zeitgeist
Acknowledgements
Further Reading
Illustrations
Also by Simon
Copyright
‘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
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.