Encyclopaedia Britannica

And so the Britannica print edition is dead.  I didn't actually use it much in the pre-Internet days; I was into radio, electronics, computing, maths and science, which EB never seemed good at.  I remember (I must have been about 15) looking up the definition of a tensor in the EB and being disappointed with the gnomic, incomprehensible little article there.  This would have been the fifteenth edition, a staple when I was a kid of any biggish library; this was the edition that notoriously mucked the reader around with its Propaedia, Micropaedia and Macropaedia sections that kept on telling you that better information might be available in a volume different to the one you'd just lugged off the shelf.

David Bellamy used always to be in the newspaper ads for the EB, testifying that his reading of it at home made up for his not getting much out of school.  Ads presumably aimed at well-off, benevolent parents; the advertising always talked up the educational benefits so as to convince prospective buyers that the volumes would be good value at any price.  One gathered from this that the price was actually very high.  In the mid-90s I was at an agricultural fair, of all places, where there were lots of tents full of people trying to sell stuff.  There was a Britannica salesman there.  He had a little flip-chart on his table, consisting of about half-a-dozen cardboard rectangles attached to a dinky triangular frame.  This was in the days before PowerPoint had conquered the world.  'Have You Considered The Benefits Of Owning A Great Encyclopaedia?' or something like that was on the first page, and probably the second page said something similarly-capitalized about how much my hypothetical kids would get out of my owning A Great Encyclopaedia, and etc etc etc.  He read out each little page, running his finger under the words as he (slowly) said them, as though addressing a cretin who needed reinforcement of the concepts via multiple channels.  Is this an actual sales technique that they're told to do, I asked myself?  If so it wasn't working.  I eventually interrupted his flip-chart usage to try to ask flat-out how much it cost, and I didn't get a straight answer, though he did imply that I probably wouldn't be able to afford it.

How times change.  I now own a nice 1950 edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 15 alphabetical volumes plus World Survey volume, which I picked up from a charity shop for the price of a large round of drinks.  It looks good on the shelf and smells nice and leathery but I have to admit it doesn't get read very much.  I love the idea of books that set out to do something very specific; with language textbooks I'm always keen to see that the author has a specific end in mind, whether it be conversational confidence, fluent reading ability, or just tourist-level survival level in the language.  I want some evidence that the author has thought about what he's going to achieve.  With encyclopaedias, I like to see how much of the world the editors have set out to encompass.  I have a three-volume German set of Duden volumes from the 60s that betray fascination with machinery, processes, things that work; the Larousse French volumes are full of technical terms for old-fashioned things such as the sails of three-masted ships and bits of steam engines.  Reading an encyclopaedia from cover to cover is a routine sort of stunt but reading one in a foreign language would probably be very educational, and would leave you with a hell of a lot of arcane vocabulary at the end of it.  I've never done this, of course.

The famous 1911 Britannica is online now at various places, and I spent an hour or two today looking at the volumes that were available at OpenLibrary.  I do worry about the digitization of knowledge and the danger that everything we know might get clobbered by a Carrington Event, but there's no going back to the old days, and I wouldn't really want to anyway.