Britannica

Remembering Encyclopedias

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Encyclopaedia_Britannica_15_with_2002

By User:SEWilco – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia

I grew up in a house filled with books, perhaps explaining the condition of my own home. One special collection of books was the bookcase of Collier’s Encyclopedias and annual updates. One of my favorite rainy day occupations was to sit or lay on the floor in front of the bookcase and page through a volume of Collier’s. There was a serendipity as one moved from article to article, learning about an aspect of human physiology, a famous person, or a distant country. Perhaps it was this that birthed the never achievable passion of a knowledge of everything that is part of my love of reading.

The word “encyclopedia” literally means “complete instruction.” I found it tremendously exciting, and a bit daunting, that at least a summary of this knowledge could be collected on the two shelves of that bookcase. It turns out that individuals and groups of people have attempted this gargantuan task since Pliny the Elder compile Naturalis Historiae in the first century, publishing a partial version between 77 and 79 AD before the eruption of Vesuvius resulted in his death. Wikipedia, our digital version of an “open source” encyclopedia includes an extensive article on the “Encyclopedia” which I will not replicate here, except to say that ever since Pliny, and in many cultures, encyclopedia making has been a consistent human endeavor.

The Encyclopedia Britannica for many years occupied pride of place among English language encyclopedias, first published in print between 1768 and 1771 and in updated print versions until 2010, which they ceased selling in 2012. Throughout its history, Britannica featured eminent contributors in their respective fields including individuals like Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, and contemporaries like Milton Friedman, Carl Sagan, and surgeon Michael DeBakey.

When I was growing up, and even into the early years of our marriage when we were contacted by one, there were encyclopedia sales persons, both door to door or even in mall kiosks. One could buy them on the installment plan, which was convenient for many since the lump sum fee was huge. Sometimes there were specialized encyclopedias. I collected a set of science encyclopedias sold at our local grocery store. Later, during a period when I thought I might be a doctor, my parents acquired a medical encyclopedia. Then there was Collier’s, published by Crowell, Collier, and MacMillan. Colliers was not quite as in-depth as Britannica and deeper than the more popular World Book. Groliers was another popular encyclopedia. It was actually the first go-to source for reports for school, until we got far enough along that we were not allowed to cite encyclopedias.

One of the challenges of encyclopedias was that they went out of date as new events occurred and new discoveries were made. Some of the countries for which there were articles no longer existed as either names changed or borders were re-drawn. Annual updates helped if you could find the updated information. Later, digital encyclopedias, which were less expensive and sometimes bundled with computers were introduced, and these were updated often.

The introduction of the internet spelled the end of the encyclopedia, as a printed book, regularly updated, and even to software versions. As of this writing, it is still possible to purchase print versions of the World Book, and older versions are plentiful in second-hand stores and online. Britannica sold versions of encyclopedias on CD’s for a time, then went entirely online. In 2001, the encyclopedia that is the default for most of us, Wikipedia, was launched. The idea was to create an open source, collaborative encyclopedia to which anyone who is registered can contribute. Many articles approach the accuracy and depth of Britannica, but the user must also beware that articles can reflect the ideological bias of contributors or even “edit wars” between contributors with different viewpoints. It is a non-profit effort funded by the Wikimedia Foundation that accepts donations to defray this effort. Currently, there are 301 language editions of Wikipedia. It is now one of the ten most popular websites in the world.

Today, online encyclopedias with their hyperlinked text, and indeed the internet itself, searched by Google, and browsed from one link to another, are our encyclopedias, putting vast amounts of information, far exceeding a print encyclopedia at one’s disposal, even from the phones in our pockets. If anything, all this even more powerfully feeds the illusion that we can know anything and everything.

While the potential is greater, it is also different from a child in front of a row of encyclopedias. Often, I read an article that interested me all the way through, while skipping the ones that did not. The lacks of links did not take me from one article to another without ever finishing anything. On the other hand, one is much more aware of how our knowledge of one thing is linked to other things. I’ll leave it to others to define which is better. What I offer is simply a memoir of a cultural transformation that has occurred within a single life.

Review: A Great Idea at the Time

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A Great Idea at the TimeA Great Idea at the Time, Alex Beam. New York: PublicAffairs, 2008.

Summary: Beam narrates the story of the Great Books movement from its beginnings with John Erskine, Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, to the publication of The Great Books by Britannica and rise of Great Books groups, the “core wars” and the remnants of this movement still hanging on today.

I have probably been intrigued and tempted by the Great Books idea all of my life. I remember looking with envy at the Britannica set acquired by a friend of mine and was probably saved from acquiring one myself only by my wife’s very sensible questions: “where are you going to put those?” and “are you going to read them?” Still, along the way, I’ve attempted to read at least some of these, usually in annotated editions (the Britannica set is not), guided by Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book and Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan.

So it was with some interest that I picked up Alex Beam’s book which is neither hagiography nor hatchet job, but a highly readable, and a times humorous, look at the Great Books movement and particularly its two principle lights: Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler.

The book traces the beginnings to various “great books” lists, most notably Charles Eliot’s at Harvard, which eventuated in the Harvard Classics, Adler’s initial inspiration. Adler was mentored by John Erskine, who advocated for the great books at Columbia in the General Honors course, which eventually Adler taught as a graduate student in the 1920s. Erskine, Adler, and Clifton Fadiman also taught courses for working adults beginning the dual character of Great Books promotion in the academy and in “middlebrow” circles among working people seeking a broader perspective on life.

Then enters Hutchins who invites Adler to Yale in 1927, and then to the University of Chicago, when Hutchins became president in 1929. Together they sought to reform undergraduate education around a Great Books curriculum and later promoted Great Books groups among the public culminating in the Great Books Foundation to promote these groups. Within four years (by the late 1940s) they claimed there were 2,500 such groups meeting across the country.

William Benton’s involvement was a key moment in the Great Books movement. A consummate salesman and member of a Chicago Great Books group, he acquires Encyclopedia Britannica and proposes publishing a collection of “the Great Books”. Adler, Hutchins, and Erskine oblige and Beam narrates the sometimes hilarious process by which certain books were included or excluded by this committee of white males, selecting largely a collection of books by white males. He also gives a detailed account of Adler’s signature contribution to this project, The Syntopicon, an index of 102 ideas with references to where they arise in the Great Books. Beam describes the questionable marketing techniques used to lure middle-class families to acquire an impressive looking set of books most would barely read.

The rest of the book is an account of the gradually dwindling sales and disappointments of both Adler and Hutchins, the “core wars” which eliminated many of these works from college curricula at most universities, offset by the narratives of those whose lives were profoundly touched by the Great Books, and the collegiate holdouts, like St. John’s in Annapolis and Santa Fe, where the Great Books are the curriculum. He concludes with describing Great Books weekends where, although he is “of a certain age” he is the youngest person in the room.

One wonders in reading this if Adler and Hutchins had two principle faults: inflexibility and codifying the Great Books into a published set. Beam contrasts this movement with Oprah’s book club (which probably has Adler and Hutchins turning in their graves). I would add the attention book recommendations receive from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Neither are recommending fluff books and there is always a spike in books sales around their recommendations. While it is true there are many adults who only read a few books a year, and that mostly contemporary popular fiction, there are those who recognize that something was missing in their education, and are looking for help in enlarging their horizons.

What if, instead of pouring their efforts into dubious marketing of the Great Books sets, Adler and Hutchins had worked to develop annotated works, and good discussion guides, and maybe excluded some of the more challenging and obscure ancient mathematical and scientific works? What if they had shown a more enlightened approach that recognized great works like W. E. B DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk and other works by those not in the “dead white male” tradition? Might they have forged a literacy movement that would have embraced all Americans and avoided the “core wars?” Maybe not, and it is clear that this just was not their vision. What Beam’s book makes clear is that it was this truncated vision, and not the American populace that was to blame for their disappointments.