It wasn’t just a nostalgia trip for me, it was a learning trip. I can only confirm the old adage that education is wasted on the young. Did you know, for example, why we hear better on water than land? Or why some people have dimples? And does iron get heavier when it rusts? I found it diverting, hilarious, surprising.
Equally surprising was the discovery that new junior encyclopaedias were still being published in heavy print. In 2020 Britannica launched a new single-volume, full-colour, punchily designed edition called Children’s Encyclopaedia (in the UK) and Kids’ Encyclopaedia (in the US). Its editor Christopher Lloyd wrote something unusual in his introduction, something few editors of encyclopaedias had mentioned before: he admitted there was a lot he didn’t know. The known unknowns, he suggested, might be as interesting as anything else, for they were the inspiration for future generations (and future editions). He hoped that an enquiring mind rewarded in an orderly way – and is this not the best value of an encyclopaedia yet produced, even at this late hour? – would prove to be a reliable and satisfying alternative to the maelstrom online.
I learnt a lot. A nebula cloud the size of Earth only weighed as much as a small sack of potatoes. I read how crystals form. I discovered that the oldest living things on earth were the Great Basin bristlecone pines in the Rocky Mountains (around 5000 years). I questioned the statement that a human being can make more than 10,000 different faces, and wondered how one measured them. I was disappointed to find that the Bugatti La Voiture Noire hypercar would cost me $18.7 million. And I regained my faith in human ingenuity when I saw that the first artificial kidneys were adapted from washing machines. A lot of these were the sort of hey-wow factoids I had learnt to distrust as an adult, substitutes for deeper learning. But they made the child in me want to know more.
The book joined the unsteady piles of encyclopaedias to the left of my desk. I counted eighty-seven volumes in all, a wildfire of information. The whole spinning world continues to revolve in those pages, pungently outmoded as they are. And to handle just one of those books is to be transported to a place of dedication and expertise, and often to obscurity, and occasionally to genius. I’m saddened that the world no longer has a use for most of them, and that this remarkable corner of history is history itself.
* The graveclass="underline" kidney stones.
* The entry runs to around 11,000 words, with 200 references and links. In November 2008 I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg in London. He was twenty-four, and only worth about $3bn then, and Facebook only had around 100 million members (compared to the 2.85 billion active monthly users it claimed in March 2021). He already had his familiar mantra: Facebook is about sharing. ‘The idea was always, tell people, “share more information”,’ he told me. ‘And that way we could gain more understanding about what’s going on with the people around you.’ This was long before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and all of the other negative Facebook revelations that showed how the illicit harvesting of this shared information could be used for political ends. ‘People have always spent a lot of time communicating, connecting, sharing with the people who are around them and are important to them,’ Zuckerberg continued. ‘It’s a very human thing.’ I asked him where this quest for knowledge began (the popular story was that it began as a way to meet girls). ‘All my friends at school, we always talked about how the world would be better if there was more information available, and if you could understand what was going on with other people more – essentially if people shared more information about themselves.’ Without ever calling it this, he was making the world’s largest self-selecting personal digital encyclopaedia. Not always an accurate one, of course, but a vibrantly active hyperlinked resource.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank everyone who has helped me with this book. This number includes the pair I’ve been grateful to for many years, and whose wisdom and enthusiasm is never taken for granted: my agent Rosemary Scoular and my editor Jenny Lord.
The team at Weidenfeld and the wider Orion empire has provided untold expertise. Thank you to Steve Marking and Arneaux for the wonderfully arresting jacket design, to Sarah Fortune, Kate Moreton, Lucy Cameron and Ellen Turner, and to my copy editor Seán Costello, who detected anomalies, repetitions, questionable assumptions and repetitions.
The staff of the London Library have rooted out many rare and important editions. Much of this book was researched during lockdown, and the library’s postal system was another wonderful service from this exceptional institution.
My thanks also to Johnny Davis, Leo Robson and Catherine Kanter for providing inspiration and the occasional volume. I spoke to many people at Wikipedia who do not receive a mention in the text, and I appreciate the time they spent with me. I am indebted to Andrew Bud for conducting his usual meticulous read. Professor Daniel Pick provided similarly cogent and far-sighted comments.
There are several scholars who have devoted many years to the study of encyclopaedias and their contexts, and I list some of their major publications below. The works of Frank and Serena Kafker, Jason König, Greg Woolf, Peter Burke, Jeff Loveland and Ann Blair were particularly useful, combining rigorous detail with engaging readability.
This book is dedicated to my wife Justine, who sighed hardly at all when another set of pungent old flaky books arrived in the post, and has been my index and spine throughout.
Further Reading
The following guide to further reading contains one glaring omission: encyclopaedias. I’ve written about so many intriguing possibilities, and it would be superfluous to list them all again here.
I have attempted to record the sources of my own knowledge in the footnotes, particularly the valuable contributions from academic journals. The following books go into greater detail about much of the history and debating points I’ve discussed in the previous pages. All have proved invaluable in my research.
Arnar, Anna, Encyclopedism from Pliny to Borges (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 1990)
Arner, Robert D., Dobson’s Encyclopaedia: The Publisher, Text, and Publication of America’s First Britannica, 1789–1803 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991)
Barney, Stephen et al., eds, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Blair, Ann, Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021)
Blair, Ann, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010)
Boyles, Denis, Everything Explained That Is Explainable: On the Creation of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Celebrated Eleventh Edition, 1910–11 (New York: Knopf, 2016)
Broughton, John, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual (Beijing;
Cambridge: O’Reilly Media, 2008)
Burke, Peter, A Social History of Knowledge: from Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, 2000)