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.
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.