The world in the balance: Britannica’s classic eleventh edition from 1910/11
There was a catch, of course. The goods were newly printed but old stock. The bargain on offer was the ninth edition, the ‘Scholars edition’ with all those brilliant but often too brilliant entries, parts of it twenty-three years old, repackaged and re-marketed by two businessmen who had no input into its editorial content and no time to read its pages. But for Britannica there was no catch: the cut-price marketing push transformed the fortunes and future of the company, and brought profit to The Times after years of losses. Before the offer, and disregarding thousands of pirated editions, the ninth edition had sold about 5000 sets over ten years; the Times adverts doubled that in a few months. And beyond this, the businessmen, who were American and brought with them American concepts of the hard sell, transformed the entire notions of what an encyclopaedia could be, who would buy it, and how they should pay for it.
From now on, the encyclopaedia would no longer be just for the wealthy or well educated. It was no longer aimed at the contributors’ peers. It was now to be sold to everyone with even a modest education who wanted to better understand the changes around them, and wished to improve the lives of their family. Comprehensive knowledge would become aspirational and affordable by instalments, and the market for encyclopaedias would move from the margins to the mainstream.
The cut-price adverts in The Times varied in length and appearance, becoming almost as much a fixture as its court reports. In return for this, and for its occasional editorial support, the newspaper received one guinea for every set of Britannica sold through its pages. It was a perfect match: each a fusty institution with enough authority to sink a battleship, each a cash-strapped knowledge base struggling to find its feet in a modernising world. One of the advertisements stated ‘The Encyclopaedia Britannica is too well known to need description,’ but then proceeded to describe it for more than 5000 words.
The
Britannica
is essentially the production of men who wrote out of the fulness of knowledge. The wonderful story of the 19th century is told by the men who made its greatness … for the men who fought against ignorance, and brought enlightenment to their generation, themselves tell how the light was spread.
*
The adverts were the chief responsibility of Henry Haxton, a well-connected newspaper man from the Hearst stable and a literary showman of the Barnum school. He was happy to boost circulation with any stunt or scheme, but he was also a man of higher culture, an urban salon dweller, a great friend of James McNeill Whistler.
Haxton had been hired by Horace Hooper, a fellow American who saw Britannica as much as a trading commodity as a learning resource. Hooper was the product of the Chicago school of publishing, which bred a mindset of cheap books, knock-offs, multi-volumes, Bibles and the selling of reference works to everyone who wished to be thought truly American. Encyclopaedias were synonymous with aspiration. If New York and Boston were the well-mannered boutique side of the book trade, Chicago was the cacophonous supermarket. Having successfully sold a great many lesser and pirated sets with less prestigious names, Hooper regarded Britannica as under-exploited, both in the United States and its home market. Resolving to fix this, he and his colleagues successfully negotiated reprint rights with A. & C. Black, the encyclopaedia’s Edinburgh-based owners, and they set about reviving a sleeping giant.
But Hooper and Haxton’s bold manipulation of the ninth edition was just a precursor to their real achievement. Not the tenth, which consisted solely of supplements to the ninth and made no special claims for itself beyond its earnest continuance of a line, but the eleventh edition, arguably the most varied and robust popular encyclopaedia ever made. It was so varied, indeed, and so enduring, that when Wikipedia opened for business ninety years later, it copied almost every word for its website, finding in it a solid base on which to build a digital revolution.*
Haxton’s promotion for the eleventh edition was just as wordy as his previous campaigns. He outlined the depth of coverage (‘history and race development … biography, law and physics …’) and the timeliness of the work (‘the Britannica will enlighten you on … prohibition, suffrage, tariffs, currency, waterways, transportation and government ownership!’). He called the new edition ‘a liberal education’, and remarked on its universal accessibility: ‘In answer to the hundred questions which everyday come to your mind and your wife’s and children’s minds, it will give you more precise information than you can get from any other source.’
The key theme of this edition was progress – of the world, of Great Britain’s place within it, of the encyclopaedia itself. The editors intended it as an altogether more engaging publication than its predecessors, and almost imperceptibly a more humane one. It was an invitation to a conversation, a liberating force. It had a new publisher, the University of Cambridge, giving Britannica an even more noble cloak of respectability than it had achieved under the aegis of The Times. But under the editorship of Hugh Chisholm, a generous, clubbable man whose journalistic experience extended no further than editing the St James Gazette, it assumed a decidedly more energetic and less reserved academic approach, and certainly a less long-winded one, and adopted a warmer and more personable hue, so that its articles were far closer in tone to a genial discussion in a gentleman’s club than a stern address from a lectern.
The eleventh edition is still widely regarded as a pinnacle, both of the encyclopaedia industry and the publishing industry. One may begin with the layout, a clear double column per page with tight but wholly legible type. Then there was its self-confidence: to claim, as Henry Haxton had done, that it marked ‘the high tide mark of human knowledge’ was not empty rhetoric; it was a belief extensively shared by its editors, and almost certainly by its readers. In his illuminating biography of the eleventh edition, Denis Boyles observed that it ‘has a personality that can’t be easily overlooked; it’s plausible, reasonable, unruffled, often reserved, completely authoritative’. He goes as far as to call it ‘the last great English-language encyclopaedia. As a general reference work it’s unrivalled, as unique now as when it was published.’*
Writing in the New Yorker in 1981, the Dutch author Hans Koning celebrated the Eleventh’s seventieth birthday: its readership was once ‘simply and obviously every English-speaking educated person on earth, who … would expect to find and would find the final authority on everything.’
Koning reasoned that the Encyclopédie of 1751 rang in the age of reason, and the eleventh edition rang it out. He believed it marked the last time that an encyclopaedia could hope to map a circle of all human knowledge ‘with a single centre’, for the world then ‘was a rational and ultimately a harmonious place … In 1910, Anglo-Saxon self-confidence and self-satisfaction were unshakeable.’