Simon Garfield - All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia

From Ant to Physiology: Rogets Britannica and a list of his contributions

And of course he had found time for something else, for while he was writing his Britannica entries he was also writing/composing/compiling/producing/penning his Thesaurus. I was enchanted by the conflation of these two great reference works, both of which Id consulted all my life. But perhaps I shouldnt have been: Rogets fellow contributors to my Supplements included Walter Scott, William Hazlitt and Robert Stevenson.

A few weeks later I came across another set of Britannica, in the basement of Henry Pordes Books in Charing Cross Road. They were just there, in a row on the floor, kickable. It took a bit of effort to crouch down, ease one volume from the pile of other reference books above it (the Australian Encyclopaedia, the Encyclopaedia of Restoration Comedy), and bring it up to a level where it could be identified as Volume 11 of the 1951 London printing of the fourteenth edition (twenty-five volumes, 38 million words, 17,000 illustrations, slippery black faux-leather binding, gold embossed lettering, nine-hole side-stitching, whiff of tobacco and fish). Once I was upright the volume was tricky to holdlarge, heavy and unwieldy, all the things one hopes an encyclopedia will be, always suggestive of a proper bounty.

Volume 11 (Gunn to Hydrox) contained, in very small print, important information about the herring, the herringbone pattern and homosexuality. This edition, launched in 1929 and updated every few years, had four founding aims: to promote international understanding; to strengthen the bonds between English-speaking peoples; to encourage interest in and support for science; and to sum up the ideas of the age for future generations. It contained original articles by Alfred Hitchcock (Motion Pictures), Linus Pauling (Ice; the Theory of Resonance), Edward Weston (Photographic Art), Margaret Mead (Child Psychology), J.B. Priestley (English Literature), Jonas Salk (Infantile Paralysis), J. Edgar Hoover (FBI), Harold Laski (Bolshevism), Konstantin Stanislavsky (Theatre Directing and Acting), Helen Wills (Lawn Tennis) and Orville Wright (Wilbur Wright). What a line-up! The articles on flying and homosexuality would now be considered off-beam, to say the least.

The week after I bought Peter Hodgsons nineteenth-century supplements, I went on eBay again. I was becoming hooked on old knowledgeand how cheap it was. A seller called 2011123okay from Haywards Heath was willing to part with a complete nineteen-volume Childrens Britannica from 1993 for 99p. Davidf7327 from Buckfastleigh was selling a twenty-six-volume 1968 Britannica (with yearbook and atlas) for 1. And cosmicmanallan from the Rhymney Valley offered a twenty-four-volume set of the fourteenth edition, condition good, for 3. There was a lot of talk in the papers at the time of how we were all searching for certainty in our lives: amid Covid-19 and disruptive social change, we yearned for an element of stability and controlsomething trustworthy and authentic, the reliable pre-pandemic world in reliable physical form. Not the case with encyclopedias, it seemed; not if the items on eBay were anything to go by.

Someone calling themselves thelittleradish was selling the complete fifteenth edition, the last in the line, originally published in 1974, thirty-four volumes including yearbooks. This particular set was last updated in 1988, and they were in near-perfect condition. The starting price of the auction was 15. I thought they might reach 30 or 40. But no one else wanted them, so the set was mine for 15, which was obviously incredible considering that it contained the work of around 4000 authors from more than 100 countries. And these authors werent just random people. They were experts, PhD people, men and women who had not only attained excellence in their specialisms, but were able to share their knowledge with others, with me. According to Britannicas own account, the editorial creation of this work cost $32 million, exclusive of printing costs, which made it the largest single private investment in publishing history. And the price now44p a volume, less than the cost of a Mars barmade it the best value education one could possibly buy, and the fastest depreciating assemblage of information ever known. If the market assigned true worth, then the stock in encyclopedias had tumbled into the basement, if not back into the soil.

Of course, I had to add petrol to that. I drove down to CambridgeCambridge!to collect the set in my seething Toyota (Cambridge University Press had published Britannica in its heyday at the beginning of the twentieth century). thelittleradish turned out to be a thirty-two-year-old named Emily, who was not particularly little and lived in Sawston, about seven miles from the city center, and she joked that the extra weight I was about to load into my car was nothing, for shed just had to carry all the books down the stairs. They were waiting for me in the front room, six piles spread across one wall, and as I shifted four books at a time into my boot, and then my back seats, and then my front seat, Emily apologized for the possible scatter of cat hair.