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.