The salesman reveals he is a Presbyterian Scot from the Orkneys, which may or may not be relevant (though it does throw up a link with Britannica’s first editor William Smellie). A deal is arranged, the salesman departs, and the book becomes an immediate burden to its new owner, this ‘obscene thing that affronted and tainted reality itself’. He decides to lose it in the vast Argentine National Library, a leaf in a forest, to be found only by chance.
This was the terror of the never-ending encyclopaedia, and its resting place brought to mind another of Borges’s stories, ‘The Library of Babel’ from 1941, in which the library was itself a universe, a byzantine series of hexagonal chambers containing every book ever written on every subject in every language. The library is finite but the books are infinite, and most are gibberish, and it is the hapless librarian’s and reader’s task to locate and interpret those that aren’t. Somewhere there may even be a librarian who understands the system in which these books are categorised, and somewhere in this labyrinth there may be one book with an index to all the others.
Borges’s parable presented a desperate acknowledgement of the overwhelming inexactitude of words and knowledge, and the futility of trying to contain either. But within it lay an element of hope: somewhere there was that mythical person who could understand and explain it all, that figure on the mountaintop. It has always been the encyclopaedia salesman’s mantra that this person could be you.
Unless your name is Clarence Wilmot, the troubled figure at the beginning of John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies. Wilmot is a church minister in Paterson, New Jersey, who loses his faith. To feed his family he answers an advertisement in the local newspaper for door-to-door salesmen. It’s going to be a tough job: it is 1913, and Paterson is reeling from a strike at the silk mill. Hardly anyone has any spare money for encyclopaedias, and those who do don’t want one.
And they especially don’t want The Popular Encyclopaedia, a cruelly misleading title. The Popular costs three dollars and fifteen cents for each of its twenty-four volumes, and once you have the set, a ‘free’ walnut-stained cabinet will also be yours, an heirloom for your children and your children’s children, etc. For each volume sold, Wilmot gets a dollar, but Wilmot’s three children are ever hungry. As he trudges around in the snow, he has doors slammed in his face ‘by frightened maids, on orders he could hear shouted within rooms curtained from view’. At the few thresholds he does cross he finds he has been admitted merely to alleviate the householder’s boredom. He unfurls his demo books and sample pages and reels off the stats: more than 30 million words, 25,000 entries from more than 1000 contributors, all the way from Aachen to Zwickau. Clarence Wilmot proclaimed that 85 per cent of the authors were American, ‘in sharp contrast with an unnamed competitor, whose contributors and emphasis were preponderantly British’.
Wilmot is occasionally welcomed into a home but then toyed with. On one visit his host marches him over to a study, and to the recently issued eleventh edition of Britannica, and although Wilmot protests that any true American would find far more to interest them in The Popular, and at a far better price, he is barely listened to. His mark – described by Updike as a bespectacled sallow retired accountant or clerk – tells him, ‘I don’t envy you your task … trying to sell books of knowledge in a city where ignorance is up on a high horse.’
Once or twice our man finds a sympathetic ear. ‘My English, not good,’ says one Polish immigrant. ‘Never can read. But my children, maybe. Already they speak good.’ Clarence tells the man, who was once employed at the mill, that his encyclopaedia will ensure his children get high marks at school. But then comes the heartbreak, for both salesman and his prospect: ‘Not good time now, mister. Strike … come back when strike won … You a good man. I like your ideas. America the best country.’
Clarence Wilmot then meets Mavis, an eager and willing buyer, but she is a friend of his family, and when she asks to examine his wares he takes pity on her. ‘Quite worthless really. A less expensive American imitation of a British encyclopaedia … An encyclopaedia, you might say, is a blasphemy – a commercially inspired attempt to play God, by creating in print a replica of Creation.’
But Mavis won’t let him go. She has heard encyclopaedias are all the rage. They are, he agrees: they are in the air now, along with radiotelegraphy and flying machines. ‘Encyclopaedias began, more or less, with a Frenchman named Diderot … You don’t want these books, Mavis.’
There was one more reason Wilmot was reluctant to sell his friend The Popular. He believed that all the information within an encyclopaedia ‘breaks your heart at the end, because it leaves you as alone and bewildered as you were not knowing anything’.
Wilmot had a point, and Updike did too. His novel was published in 1996, by which time personal computers were in millions of homes (Apple was already twenty), and the problem of information storage and retrieval had met a viable solution. But in 1913, when Wilmot was doing his rounds, the idea of owning knowledge in a preordained manner was as daunting as it was attractive. It was necessarily a new religion, its editor a god, its contributors the clergy. One need look no further than Britannica’s eleventh edition to see how assured this new order was, and how it left no room for doubt or debate. We were long past that point where the Greeks aspired to compiling a ‘circle of knowledge’ that could be memorised: faced with an encyclopaedic gathering in twenty-four volumes, the reader may only acknowledge what they have yet to learn, how unspecialised they are, and how lacking even in general knowledge. And thus Wilmot’s customers faced their inadequacies and fears, for there their volumes would sit, the hand-tooling pristine, the calfskin not yet creased, too solemn to even wink at us, the Tower of London in print, something always there, and therefore seldom accessed.*
So we approach this pass, just over midway in the alphabet: the encyclopaedia as problem, as fallacy, something no longer suited to its environment. Perhaps it will rise again. But for now, there does appear to be an alternative to the multi-volume set of tightly bound knowledge.
A few years before Updike’s Wilmot began plying his trade in New Jersey, two outrageously ambitious Belgians were conceiving an entirely different method of knowledge compilation and retrieval, an information system they hoped would provide access to all the world’s learning in one place. The system involved a vast collection of 3×5 index cards, and, as preposterous as it may appear to us now, it once represented a daring and viable future.
When filing was the future: four stages of classification at Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum
* Professor Richard Yeo has observed that real encyclopaedias were very much a part of Borges’s life. In an autobiographical essay, the author remembers the steel engravings in his father’s Britannica, and how, after winning a literary prize in 1929, he bought his own second-hand copy of the eleventh edition (Book History, 2007, vol. 10, Johns Hopkins University Press.)
* A publication called The Popular Encyclopaedia did exist, but it was a Scottish rather than American venture, a seven-volume set printed in Glasgow in 1841. And there was also the Newnes Popular Encyclopaedia published in London in the early 1960s in thirty-eight three-shilling parts. Neither was a model for Updike; rather, his particular Popular was a sort of compendium of the World Book, Grolier, Americana and Compton’s.