SEE `M' FOR MEMORIES
An encyclopedia wasn't just a presence on the shelf — it was a ticket to aspirational living
The station wagon, the white picket fence, the country-club membership — all were milestones on the unbound turnpike to middle-class acceptance. But nothing said, “Dear, we've arrived” quite like a set of encyclopedias — leather-bound, fat with facts, stern of spine — gently bending a living-room bookcase with the weight of the world's accumulated knowledge.
It has been more than a decade since the leading compiler of collective wisdom, Encyclopedia Britannica, published its last print edition.
Yet during its bulk-buy salad days in the 1950s and '60s, the cold-call warrior fanned out across North America with a pitch not just for a handsome if hefty box set of `Didyou-knows?' — he was flogging a punch-card to upward mobility.
Lower-income parents with aspirations for their children were targeted by this savvy salesforce first tapped by Sears Roebuck when it bought Britannica in 1923. Its marketing theory was simple: We're not selling books, we're selling dreams.
With price tags as heavy as the books, however, it took volumes of persuasiveness to close a sale. Yet sell they did, pumping vast profits into Britannica's coffers and transforming the sidewalk solicitor from a novelty to a suburban staple to a punchline.
By the 1970s, fewer door knocks were being answered as more women entered the workforce, forcing Britannica to rely instead on sales leads generated from advertising and call centres. In 1996, after six decades and a sales force that was 2,300-strong at its zenith, the door slammed for the last time.
For one of those troupers, it was a mournful day. Speaking to the
Huffington Post at the time, Myron Taxman, said: “A lot of times, I still want to read an article (in a book). Unfortunately, the rest of the world does not.”
Taken from the Greek enkyklios paideia, meaning `knowledge in the round,' the first encyclopedia is generally regarded as 1st-century Roman writer Pliny the Elder's Natural History.
In France between 1751 and 1772, the philosopher Denis Diderot took a more rigorous approach with his Encyclopédie, offering readers treatises from Voltaire and Jean-jacques Rousseau, and providing us a system of cross-referencing dubbed the search algorithm of the 18th century.
Yet it was the Scots who gave us the first English-language general encyclopedia. Founded in 1768 in Edinburgh by the former priest and polymathic William Smellie,
printer Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, described as an engraver with “an unfeasibly large nose,” Britannica set the standard with entries listed in alphabetical order. Content was provided not necessarily by experts but by “fileting published books, a common practice.”
Accuracy may have been suspect in those early days — and unsavoury views widespread — but Smellie was a stickler for succinctness, writing: “The art of conveying much sentiment in a few words is the happiest talent an author can be possessed of.”
As works of reference, encyclopedias slowly earned their place on library shelves, living rooms and embassy reading rooms, with some editions treasured as much for their contributors as their content.
The 1929 11th edition of Britannica, for instance, offered a feature on motion pictures by renowned director Cecil B. Demille and an essay on English literature by J.B. Priestley, while the 13th edition — released in 1926 — contained articles from Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and Harry Houdini.
By the 21st century nearly every Western country had produced or released encyclopedias in its native tongue, including Canada, where the first edition of the Canadian Encyclopedia arrived in 1985. Since going digital in 2001, it has been free to anyone with internet access and receives more than 11 million unique visitors a year.
For physical products like World Book and Britannica, the slow descent into irrelevance began with free services like Microsoft's Encarta, which lasted from 1993 to 2009, and snowballed as online access spread.
Britannica launched its first online edition in 1994 and in 2012 announced it would stop producing hardbound copies of its reference books — after 244 years. Its last printed version, the 32-volume 2010 edition weighing 60 kg and boasting new entries on global warming and genetic science, sold just 8,000 sets and accounted for one per cent of the firm's revenue — from a peak of $650 million of sales in 1990.
Yet the woolly mammoth in the room is Wikipedia. The maligned research site is still dismissed by many academics, but its “world of writers” approach continues to gain mainstream acceptance.
For lovers of print, however, it still feels like cheating. Britannica president Jorge Cauz vividly recalls the shock at the announcement it was going digital-only. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2013, he said: “On Twitter, one person wrote, `I'm sorry I was unfaithful to you, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia was just there, and convenient, it meant nothing. Please, come back!'”
Cauz has resisted sentimentality. “The answer is no,” he wrote of any possible print comeback. “We don't want to be like an old actor trying to hold onto his youth. You get on with the times, and our times are digital.” Those are harsh words for Simon Garfield.
Author of All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia, the lifelong admirer says an old encyclopedia, of any vintage, has the ability to enthrall, enlighten and shock like no other book.
“A fine encyclopedia,” he tells The Spectator magazine, “will stand you in good stead like an old wristwatch: its timing may be out, and sometimes it may not work at all, but its mechanics will always intrigue.”