The oldest and one of the most famous universal encyclopedias in the capitalist world. The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in three volumes in Edinburgh from 1768 to 1771. On the whole, the first eight editions were not of a very high standard. Marx, who used the eighth edition of the encyclopedia, remarked (based on his study of the articles on military and historical subjects) in a letter to F. Engels on July 16, 1857, that this encyclopedia was “copied almost verbatim from German and French publications” (K.
Add tags for 'Socialism, principles and outlook: (Reprinted by permission of the author from the Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th edition, 1929); and Fabianism (Reprinted from the new edition of Chamber's Encyclopedia by permission of the publishers)'.
Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. The ninth edition (1875-89, in 25 volumes) of the Britannica showed considerable improvement, especially in the sections on the natural and exact sciences. The 11th edition (1910-11, in 29 volumes) is considered to be the best: the content was broadened, biographies of living figures were included for the first time, and the scientific content of a number of articles was highly esteemed by contemporaries.
The extremely well-compiled index was also noteworthy. In 1929 the 14th edition of the Britannica was published in 24 volumes; it was the last edition to be numbered. Since that time the Britannica has been published using the so-called continuous revision system, according to which a small portion of the articles are revised at the time of each annual reprinting. Some American and British scholars, in analyzing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, have noted that most of the articles have been reprinted for many years without any changes although many of them contain outmoded, erroneous information. The predominant type of article is an extended survey of a broad subject, as a result of which the number of entries is comparatively small (averaging 40,000 terms). The publishers of the Britannica draw upon scholars from approximately 50 countries to write the articles.
Many questions of history, philosophy, politics, and economics are explained from anticommunist points of view. At the beginning of the 20th century a joint Anglo-American venture was formed to work on the Britannica, a fact which has led to its transformation into a British-American encyclopedia both in content and in the basic staff of authors and editors. Since the early 1940’s the Britannica has been published in Chicago by Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., headed by W. Benton (died 1973). An editorial section of the Britannica has been retained in London. Since 1938 yearbooks entitled Britannica Book of the Year.
Have been brought out (in separate American and British editions). In 1947, four supplementary volumes of the Britannica were published, reflecting the events of 1937-46 connected with World War II and its preparation and consequences. For the 200th anniversary of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in 1968, three volumes were issued containing major articles on various branches of knowledge. In 1969 announcements appeared in the press concerning the initial stage of preparing a new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
They look like a segment of Borges’s Library of Babel: twenty-four volumes almost uniform in bulk (a thousand pages each, give or take a few), identically bound in a reddish-brown cloth that resembles the leather commonly called morocco. On the spine of each volume an alphabetic range is represented by the first letters of the volume’s first and last entries: A to Anno. Annu to Baltic. Baltim to Brail. Sometimes it’s possible to guess what these entries are, mostly not. Rayn to Sarr.
Sars to Sorc. To me as a child the labels seemed like guideposts along an epic journey, pointing me through land after land: Libi to Mary. Maryb to Mushe.
Mushr to Ozon. Once they had their own special bookcase of lustrous wood, three rows of eight volumes each; now they share with other stuff one painted shelf and half of another on the wall beside my desk. I still open a volume now and then, sometimes seeking information, but usually not. The set is as old as I am, and I am conscious of the similarity. The Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was first published in 1929. Unlike previous editions, which were updated only by periodic supplementary volumes that began again at A, the Fourteenth was updated whenever it was reprinted: the editors chose certain stretches for revision, saving others for later reprintings, like a farmer rotating his crops. My family’s volumes are copyright 1941, and though many articles had been added or updated to take account of the fast-changing world of the 1940s, the majority remained identical to the 1929 originals.
This brief entry (which I don’t remember ever reading as a child) falls between “Hitchin,” a market town in Hertfordshire, and “Hittites, the”: Hitler, Adolf (1889– ), Bavarian politician (Austrian by birth), was born at Braunau, Upper Austria on April 20, 1889. He was an architect’s draughtsman by profession. He was a leader of the reaction in Bavaria, and founded, in 1919, the national socialist workers’ party, formed to oppose the social democrats, in reliance on a military organization known as the Hitler volunteers.
The entry goes on to say that Hitler has repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, is “violently anti-Semitic” but “sincere and strict in his conduct,” “abstains from meat, liquor, and tobacco,” and “is unmarried.” The key to his fundamental ideas “is his autobiography, Mein Kampf, dictated while he was in prison.” That’s it. In the twenty-third volume ( Vase to Zygo) is an article titled “War in Europe, 1939– ” that’s very much longer than Hitler’s and was obviously written later. Between the updating of the eleventh volume ( Gunn to Hydrox) and the twenty-third, the editors were able to write up the early events of the new war. (“The most unpopular in history,” the article says.) I don’t remember reading that article either, though I have a memory of the maps.
My own secret path through the twenty-four volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica only skirted such inflamed topics: they weren’t what I sought or where I went. But this is the strange magic of an arrangement of all the world’s knowledge in alphabetical order: any search for anything passes through things that have nothing in common with it but an initial letter. It’s impossible not to absorb something from some of them.
Look up “Dog” ( Damascu to Educ) to study the attractive plates and to pick the breed you most want to own, and you may notice the nearby entry for “Dogger Bank” (“an extensive shoal in the North Sea”) and the sea battle fought there on January 24, 1915, which you had not previously heard of.