ALPHABETICAL ORDER
Before a page of Britannica was compiled, William Smellie and his publishers faced a dilemma that wouldn’t trouble us now – the question of how to organise such a vast tower of information in a way that would make its compilation rigorous and its reading seamless.
The method chosen, alphabetical order, was far from universally accepted; this easy collation of characters might indeed be anti-intelligent. To take the ‘A’s, on the first page of the first edition: could a reader gain a rounded knowledge of the world from a discordant appreciation that Aabam is ‘a term, among alchemists, for lead’, or that Aarseo is ‘a town in Africa, situated near the mouth of the river Mina’, or that Abactores is ‘a term for such as carry off or drive away a whole herd of cattle by stealth’ and that Abactus is ‘an obsolete term, among physicians, for a miscarriage procured by art’?*
Wouldn’t this be just a speculative, subjective and irregular collection of what today we may dismissively call factoids? Would such a random process not be considered absurd in any other constructive situation in life, such as the placement of skilled workers on a production line ordered to work next to the person closest alphabetically in surname, irrespective of their role? Or would this method inadvertently reflect the true nature of Britannica and most encyclopaedias before and since – that is, a scattershot accretion of geographic, philosophic and scientific miscellany, a grand admission that the organic amassment of human knowledge is an unattainable and maybe even fruitless endeavour?
The alphabet is a concept, an abstraction. Its letters began as representative symbols, in much the same way as a coin became representative of money: the worth is not in the item itself but in the promise of indicative value, in this case the wealth of communication. Language symbols appear in the West first as Egyptian hieroglyphics, and around 1800–1700 BCE appear as a twenty-two-letter abjad, a system consisting entirely of consonants. This North Semitic script was similar to Old Hebrew, and we know its order was firmly established by the time nine acrostic Old Testament psalms were composed between the sixth and second centuries BCE.
The primitive alphabet was swiftly adopted by Middle-Eastern craftsmen and merchants, who found the symbols far easier to remember and record than the thousands of previous cuneiform or hieroglyphic symbols (it was perhaps the earliest example of a communication technology promoted by commerce). And from Egypt and Israel this alphabet passed to Greece around 1000–900 BCE. The Latin rendering removed the ‘zeta’ and added ‘G’, before incorporating both ‘Y’ and ‘Z’. The Roman alphabet used in the West derived largely from Etruscan characters, and extended to twenty-six letters in medieval times when ‘I’ was differentiated into ‘I’ and ‘J’, and ‘V’ was spilt into ‘U’, ‘V’ and ‘W’.*
The appeal of alphabetical order was recognised by Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, and there is some suggestion that the Library of Alexandria employed it in its classification of scrolls (by author). But it was only in the fifteenth century, with the advent of the printing press and the subsequent use of paper as a popular system of storage and trading records, that the alphabet came to be used regularly as a method of ordering and reference. The development of movable type necessitated a distinct and fixed physical placement of letters that had never been required before. The liability and speed of making text depended on knowing a set order, much as we know the QWERTY layout of the keyboard; if this was to change every time we sat down, we would probably not sit down. In the age of Gutenberg, strict placement was doubly necessary, as the carved metal letters were visible only at the tip of their metal strip; the best way to mind or find your Ps and Qs was by careful advance assignment.
The alphabet’s printed roots lie in glosses or glossaries: the definition, usually at the end of a text or book, of words considered unfamiliar to the general reader (or as the first edition of Britannica has it: ‘Glossary, a sort of dictionary, explaining the obscure and antiquated terms’). Often, as in the case of the Roman physician Galen from the second century CE, glossaries would appear in medical textbooks, and it seemed natural that these terms would appear in alphabetical order. But it wasn’t until the demand for bilingual dictionaries in the sixteenth century that the logical tradition for an instructional reference book running from A to Z was established.
But all this seemed to run counter to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s stated aim of creating a circle of human knowledge (after all, an alphabet was linear not circular, a progressive string of characters). To Britannica’s founders and editors, there was no doubt that the alphabet eased accessibility. It created order where none existed, particularly in a work of almost a thousand pages. And it helped with retrieval, enabling a fact, definition or explanation to be more easily found. What it didn’t do was assist in the interpretation of a more detailed concept, or in the presentation of one of Britannica’s proud treatises on the practical arts or sciences.
To see how William Smellie and his publishers wrestled with this dilemma, one need only consult the title page.
Encyclopaedia Britannica;
or, A
DICTIONARY
OF
ARTS and SCIENCE
COMPILED UPON A NEW PLAN
IN WHICH
The different SCIENCES and ARTS are digested into
distinct Treatises or Systems
AND
The various TECHNICAL TERMS, &c. are explained as they occur
in the order of the Alphabet
It was a compromise, an attempt to produce something both generally useful and academically detailed, in which thousands of brief definitions arranged alphabetically combined with extended expert sections on such things as Horsemanship (eight pages), Hydrostatics (nineteen pages) and Law (seventy-five pages). These longer entries – each of which could have been published as an instructive pamphlet on their own – were split into sections or chapters, these subdivisions only occasionally adopting alphabetical order.
While William Smellie’s listing of his major sources and contributors also appeared in alphabetical order (from ‘Albini tabulae anatomicae’ to ‘Young on Composition’), the editor made it clear in his preface that the system could not be extended to the more complex entries. There was a ‘folly of attempting to communicate science under the various technical terms arranged in an alphabetical order’. He found this concept ‘repugnant to the very idea of science, which is a connected series of conclusions deduced from self-evident or previously discovered principles’. The key to a reader understanding these principles depended on them being ‘laid before him in one uninterrupted chain’.
His dual approach suggested perhaps that the publishers saw two distinct sets of prospective readers. It was entirely feasible that the ‘Society of Gentlemen in Scotland’ who had both written and subscribed to the first edition, and were most likely to have rallied for the in-depth articles, were regarded as a quite separate reader to the intelligent lay figure who may have been encouraged (by newspaper advertisement or fanciful bookshop whim) to purchase the set to improve their prospects.
But it may also be that Britannica’s publishers had seized upon a brilliant system of marketing. Few people would buy just one part of an encyclopaedia arranged alphabetically; once persuaded to buy the letter ‘A’ and ‘B’ for a shilling each, a reader would either have to be disappointed with the text on offer, or be straitened financially, not to proceed to the end of the set.