5 February 2023
central-page
Before the rise of Wikipedia, one might argue that if there was one publication which could lay claim to being the mainstream summary of accepted knowledge, that publication would be the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
In 1964, Harvey Einbinder published The Myth of the Britannica, a 390-page attack on the Encyclopaedia, alleging out-of-date contents, unbalanced treatments of topics, deceptive sales tactics, and so on. He had an enormous amount to say about it. His frontal assault on the Encyclopaedia was written up in the New York Times, which called him "an angry young physicist" in February 1964. While I enjoyed reading Einbinder's critique of the Times, and as far as I can tell it looks like a well-researched and deserved attack, perhaps one of the most interesting things is what Einbinder did not say in his book.
Though Einbinder passionately argues that the EB was not living up to its marketing materials, Einbinder never does point to some other publication as doing a better job. In other words, Einbinder just takes it for granted that the EB was the world's premier encyclopedia. His intention is not to deny its status, but simply to voice his wish that it were doing a better job.
When it appeared in 1768, its three volumes came to less than 3,000 pages in total. In successive editions the Encyclopaedia grew to over thirty volumes by the early 20th century. After the massive 11th edition of 1911, then next two editions only added supplementary volumes. It would not be until 1929 that the whole Encyclopaedia was revised, at which point it appeared in just 24 volumes, and a systematic program of annual revision was taken on beginning in 1933.
From 1933 to 1973, every printing was referred to as part of the fourteenth edition of the EB, though it would perhaps be more proper to view each year's publication as its own edition. In theory, at least, the program of annual revisions would keep the whole thing up to date, and because no customer could be expected to buy an entire set each year, an annual "Book of the Year" was published which each year covered the previous year's events.
In what in the time of this fourteenth edition that Einbinder published his criticism's alleging that the program of "continuous revision" was greatly exaggerated by the company, and not nearly as effective in keeping things up to date as one might suppose. And because the size of the Encyclopaedia was capped at 24 volumes, that meant that each year, any new material added required the removal of previously existing material. Einbinder complained that this lead to a profusion of very short, uninteresting articles which could not do justice to their subjects.
As for myself, my own introduction to the Encyclopaedia Britannica was also to its "fourteenth" edition -- my grandparents had when I was growing up a full set from somewhere in either the late 1940's or early 1950's. I was particularly impressed with its articles on "Basic English" and "Shorthand", among others. I no longer have access to that old set, but archive.org has preserved Volume 20 of the 1964 printing, which appears to contain the Shorthand article in about the form I saw it. It opens with some general remarks on the history of shorthand systems, but then contains pretty detailed explanations of two systems of shorthand: the Pitman system and the Gregg system. Its description of the Gregg system was substantial enough that I learned to use it and took notes with it during high school. By 2002, you can no longer find an article on Shorthand, although you can still read about the short-eared owl and short-horned grasshopper. The last time I came across anyone who could write in Gregg shorthand was about 2011 -- and I suppose that with the increased use of computers and voice dictation it will become more and more the sort of thing that only an outdated encyclopedia can supply.
There was also a fascinating article on Basic English, a form of English with a restricted vocabulary of 850 words, part of a program for making a simplified form of English suitable for international use. The article contained not only an extended description of the system, written by C. K. Ogden, the linguist who invented it, but also its complete list of 850 words. Just as the article on shorthand contained everything an exciteable young nerd would need to start using Gregg, likewise the article on Basic English contained everything that same exciteable young nerd would need to start re-writing texts into Basic English. By 2005, however, the Basic English article had become so short that it simply gives the reader a general idea of how the system works, but its two paragraphs don't provide anything like the guidance found in earlier editions.
Access to older editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica is useful not just for charting the downfall of some interesting older articles, but also to help establish some basic markers in the intellectual history of the Western world. To take a very unpleasant example, consider holocaust denial, that squalid little corner of pseudo-history in which unsavory characters work to come up with reasons to deny the reality of Nazi atrocities during World War II. Sometimes, for example, someone who has the misfortune of coming across a holocaust denier will hear it said that the story of the holocaust was not known at the very end of World War II, but was instead gradually assembled over the next few decades.
This kind of nonsense can be quickly dispatched by anyone who goes to archive.org and checks out the 1946 Britannica Book of the Year, which makes it crystal clear that, as of 1946, any susbscriber to the annual books of the most recognizeable encyclopedia had at his hands the basic facts of the holocaust: that the Nazis exterminated most of the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe, and that the largest numbers of these murders were carried out in the concentration camps whose names are known to this day.
Collectively, the many editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, combined with its year-books, provide an excellent guide to what the mainstream public understanding of many different issues was in a given year. For this reason, I decided to go do some searching and see to what extent old issues of the Encyclopaedia might be available online. I also decided to include in my search two predecessors of the EB, Harris's Lexicon Technicum and Chambers' Cyclopaedia. In the process, I bumped into a number of the EB's year-books, while I also added to the list, and some children's encyclopedia materials that I thought seemed interesting as well. I decided not to include any of Encyclopaedia Britannica's educational films, CD-roms, or a variety of other things they published which weren't part of their central encyclopedia or its children's versions.
Perhaps someone will find the list below interesting for their own use. For the first thirteen editions of the EB, I gathered the editions from various parts of the web. These editions have since passed into the public domain in the United States. However, from the fourteenth edition on, US copyright law becomes a concern, so I limited my search to those volumes available through archive.org, a reputable 501(c)3 organization which receives US government funding, to avoid linking to less reputable sites.
Due to archive.org's practice of controlled digital lending, some of these volumes might be available only to those who sign up for an Internet Archive account, which is free and available to anyone with an email address.
The list below was born of an attempt to round up all volumes I could find of Encyclopaedia Britannica on the legal parts of the internet. It is entirely possible that I've missed some. What I can say is that for the period of 1929 to 2010, this list reflects completely or almost completely what was available in early 2023 on archive.org. Anyone who wishes to go back later and make the list more complete might do well to start by excluding files uploaded to archive.org prior to 2023.
The 14th edition saw a serious restructuring before its appearance in 1929, and it was shortly after, in 1933, that a policy of continuous revision year by year began. After this, all the various printings from 1929 to 1973 are known collectively as the fourteenth edition, despite the constant changes. A 15th edition, significantly reorganized, appeared in 1974, and the title of fifteenth edition was then applied to all printings until 2010. For the materials below, then, I think listing things by year rather than "edition" makes more sense.
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