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UNPRECEDENTED
At the peak of his fame, the broadcaster Michael Aspel turned his hand to many things. He was ‘suave’ and ‘silver-tongued’, and for a while British television couldn’t get enough of him. He began his career as a newsreader, and would soon be one of the most popular, respected and reliably bland personalities on air, presenting Ask Aspel, Antiques Roadshow and long-running radio shows on London’s Capital Radio and BBC Radio 2.
In 1973 I was in the audience at the Golders Green Hippodrome when he presented the children’s comedy/challenge show Crackerjack. That was also the year he was asked by Encyclopaedia Britannica to promote its latest edition.
Aspel appeared in magazine adverts in a grey flannel suit leaning against a shiny bookcase displaying twenty-four slabs bound in crimson. The wraparound text explained the usual stuff: 10,000 and more leading world authorities, 28,000 pages, 22,000 pictures, illustrations and maps. The text also explained that if you wanted yet more of Aspel he would come to your home free of charge, and with absolutely no obligation, in the form of a flexi disc, a 7-inch record made from very thin plastic that spun at 33 revolutions per minute. I sent off for the disc, and it was good to hear Michael’s voice.
‘This is Michael Aspel,’ he began, as familiar music played in the background. ‘No doubt you’ll recognise this bit of Beethoven,’ he said. ‘This great composer is described in Encyclopaedia Britannica as having “a musical imagination that was constantly alive”. Do you enjoy meeting people who have minds that are constantly alive?’
Imagine answering ‘no’ to that.
Children have lively minds, Aspel continues, and they want answers. ‘Lively minds shouldn’t be starved,’ he reasons. ‘That leads to apathy, frustration, waste.’ There was, of course, an easy way to feed these minds: Britannica was ‘a powerhouse of knowledge’.
Then there was a forty-five-second audio clip of an Apollo launch, and an assurance from Aspel that the Britannica was right up to date; he said there was even an article about colour television. And the Britannica had many uses beyond just helping the children – you could also widen your social contacts and further your business career. ‘Whatever the reason, I hope you will extend the courtesy you have shown in listening to me to the Encyclopaedia Britannica representative when he calls.’ (It was understood that because you had requested this record, a salesman now had your address and would be appearing on your doorstep soon.) Aspel closed by suggesting that by listening this far in the record you have already displayed a lively mind, and you would probably enjoy the quiz on the other side.
The quiz, which was read by someone other than Aspel, had twelve questions. Where did the camel come from? What has campanology to do with? How did the saxophone get its name? Alas, the record supplied no answers. For those you would have to wait until the Britannica representative paid you a little visit.
But then, a year later, Aspel’s sales pitch – all that dapper effort – was useful no more. The edition he was plugging, and the one the representative had subsequently tried hard to sell you – the fourteenth, which, since its first publication in 1929, had been revised in 1930, 1932, 1933, 1936, 1937, and every year to 1973 – had now been declared redundant. Harvey Einbinder’s time had come: the publication would soon receive a complete overhaul, including the information about the camel, campanology and the saxophone. Aspel would be all right – he would go on to advertise no-calorie Sweetex and host This Is Your Life – but the Britannica would never be the same again.
Lively minds shouldn’t be starved: Michael Aspel sells Britannica in the 1970s
The fifteenth edition of 1974 was unlike any encyclopaedia that preceded it, and its editors hoped there would never be a need for another. It was a vast and complicated endeavour, thirteen years in the making, and it arrived with the sort of operating instructions that might have floored Steve Wozniak. Gone were the days when Britannica came with a statement of intent and an explanation of cross-referencing. Taking possession of the new thirty-volume edition now involved a personal handover, and its instructions came with pie charts.*
The intention was both forward-looking and retrograde. The preface referred to a ‘Circle of Learning’, a concept that rooted it in the traditions of the ancient Greeks. The new edition aimed to give the reader access to its contents by both alphabetical order and topical subject matter. This time a reader didn’t get one encyclopaedia but three (indeed, rather than the fifteenth edition, it was sometimes called Britannica 3). There was the one-volume ‘Propaedia’, described as ‘a kind of preamble or antechamber to the world of learning that the rest of the encyclopaedia aims to encompass’. This encompassing was to be found in the ten-volume ‘Micropaedia’ (‘ready reference’ volumes containing short information on 102,000 topics) and the nineteen-volume ‘Macropaedia’ (containing knowledge in greater depth on 4200 topics). There was also the promise of annual yearbooks, the latter designed to keep the reader up to speed with world events at about the same pace as the information they’d already purchased in thirty volumes hastened towards obsolescence. No one gets to launch a monument like this without the stats: 33,141 pages, 43 million words, 25,000 illustrations. There were 4000 contributing authors from more than 100 countries. In June 1974 the advertisements heralded ‘the first new idea in encyclopaedias for 200 years … the encyclopaedia that will wear out from use, not from time.’
The price was at least £249, or about $500, and considerably more if you wanted the full morocco. The editorial creation of the work cost $32 million exclusive of printing costs: the Britannica justifiably claimed that this made it the largest single private investment in publishing history.*
Explaining the concept in a BBC interview at the time of its launch, Mortimer J. Adler, the chairman of the Board of Editors, said:
Let’s take Napoleon for a moment … You’re doing some research, and you want to find out very quickly the date that Napoleon crowned himself Holy Roman Emperor. If you went to the old
Britannica
you’d find a ten-page article, twenty columns on Napoleon, and somewhere in that the date would be buried – you couldn’t find it quickly, you might thumb through it but you wouldn’t find it. Here you’d turn to the Micropaedia first and you’d get 700 words on Napoleon, with all the facts. And then if you wanted to read more we give you index references to the long article. We’ve separated the long background pieces from the short information pieces because they have two separate functions.
*
This sounded easy enough, but the preface of the Propaedia showed how the presentation of the world’s knowledge in the world’s most famous encyclopaedia was now much more complicated than a bit of thumbing-through.