Look it Up: Encyclopaedia Britannica Going Out of Print
by Krishna Andavolu
MARCH 14, 2012 TAGS:
Sales of sets of the 244 year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica peaked in 1990, according to a New York Times story that reports on the cessation of publication of the English language's oldest compendium of knowledge. That's about when my dad bought a set. They arrived in around twenty smallish cardboard boxes emblazoned with the bristly thistle-like Britannica logo and slipped out of their shrink wrap, supple, heavy and leathery.
The volumes took their place on two rows of shelves of the computer room/den and sat there for the next two decades. I wouldn't say they went unopened, but a quick two or three years after they were bought, Microsoft Encarta arrived in our house along with a new CD-ROM reading computer. The volumes, had they not known already, officially became decorative pieces.
When the salesman sat at our dining room table back in the early 90s he convinced my father to also buy a set of the western canon's Great Books, from Homer to Henry James bound in handsome, uniform volumes. To my delight, the salesman threw in an ersatz three-volume replica of the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica replete with crooked gold-foil lettering, f-looking s's, odd-spelling and terribly outdated articles.
The real first edition was published between the years 1768 and 1771, in direct competition with Denis Diderot's French Encyclopedie. These were great products of the Enlightenment. The systemization of human knowledge held the implicit contention that man's intellect and curiosity would one day exhaust all the world's mysteries, which would then be alphabetized, sorted and seen.
Three centuries removed that idea isn't exactly quaint, but it's become complicated. Of course, during the height of the British Empire, Britannica sat as the unofficial score card of the Island nation's conquests. Neither the decline and fall of the British empire nor the degradation of the Enlightenment's basic epistemological assumptions caused the publishers of Britannica to decide to stop publishing bound volumes. It was Wikipedia and the Internet that plunged that dagger.
Sales of the encyclopedia fell to a paltry few thousand this year, and Britannica is wisely focusing on their Web properties to find a new identity in the 21st century knowledge economy. The irony, of course, is that Wikipedia's first massive influx of information came from an old edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica that fell into the public domain.
I won't shed tears for Britannica. I'll go back to my parents computer room soon and flip through some pages. I'll probably hijack that funny first edition and set it next to my concise version of the Oxford English Dictionary (still have the magnifying glass). It'll exist as a relic, as it should.
ps. I looked up "Wikipedia" on Wikipedia to write this post.
The volumes took their place on two rows of shelves of the computer room/den and sat there for the next two decades. I wouldn't say they went unopened, but a quick two or three years after they were bought, Microsoft Encarta arrived in our house along with a new CD-ROM reading computer. The volumes, had they not known already, officially became decorative pieces.When the salesman sat at our dining room table back in the early 90s he convinced my father to also buy a set of the western canon's Great Books, from Homer to Henry James bound in handsome, uniform volumes. To my delight, the salesman threw in an ersatz three-volume replica of the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica replete with crooked gold-foil lettering, f-looking s's, odd-spelling and terribly outdated articles.
The real first edition was published between the years 1768 and 1771, in direct competition with Denis Diderot's French Encyclopedie. These were great products of the Enlightenment. The systemization of human knowledge held the implicit contention that man's intellect and curiosity would one day exhaust all the world's mysteries, which would then be alphabetized, sorted and seen.
Three centuries removed that idea isn't exactly quaint, but it's become complicated. Of course, during the height of the British Empire, Britannica sat as the unofficial score card of the Island nation's conquests. Neither the decline and fall of the British empire nor the degradation of the Enlightenment's basic epistemological assumptions caused the publishers of Britannica to decide to stop publishing bound volumes. It was Wikipedia and the Internet that plunged that dagger.
Sales of the encyclopedia fell to a paltry few thousand this year, and Britannica is wisely focusing on their Web properties to find a new identity in the 21st century knowledge economy. The irony, of course, is that Wikipedia's first massive influx of information came from an old edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica that fell into the public domain.
I won't shed tears for Britannica. I'll go back to my parents computer room soon and flip through some pages. I'll probably hijack that funny first edition and set it next to my concise version of the Oxford English Dictionary (still have the magnifying glass). It'll exist as a relic, as it should.
ps. I looked up "Wikipedia" on Wikipedia to write this post.
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