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.