Each section number [in the Propaedia’s seven-page Contents section] incorporates the numbers of the part and division to which it belongs. For example, Section 725 is the fifth section in Part Seven, Division II; Section 96/10 is the Tenth Section in Part Nine, Division VI. In each sectional outline the major subjects are indicated by capital letters (‘A’, ‘B’ etc). There are always at least two major subjects, but there may be many more in a given section. When it is necessary to subdivide a major subject, up to three additional levels may appear in the outline; the first is indicated by Arabic numerals, the second by lowercase letters, and the third by Roman numerals.
There were then five pie charts relating to ten subject matters (from Life on Earth to The History of Mankind), each subject rotating to occupy a different piece of pie in the circle depending on which subject was at the centre, and therefore at the heart of a reader’s initial enquiry. And these were followed by some detailed examples designed to make finding information (about biology, say) a little easier.
Section 10.34 in Division III of Part Ten examines the nature, methods, problems and history of the biological sciences; but the knowledge of life that the biological sciences afford is outlined in Part Three. Or, to take another example, Section 10/41 in Division IV of Part Ten examines historiography and the study of history; but the actual history of mankind is outlined in Part Nine.
Not everyone found this classification edifying (or knew what the hell was going on). It is worth noting that this was not some elaborate and very expensive joke; it was a genuine and clearly overthought attempt to redefine how the communication of knowledge was absorbed in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Alas, this fabulously complex system may have already come too late: 1974 marked at least one other milestone in communication – the first mobile phone call. In the New Yorker, Hans Koning reasoned that the very form in which the fifteenth edition was published ‘showed that knowledge now came in a shattered, scattered avalanche of data, to which no category such as “purpose” was attached.’
According to an essay by Geoffrey Wolff in the Atlantic in 1974, the editors of the fifteenth edition ‘worried copy mercilessly’. Every article was rigorously outlined before the contributor got to work, and the writer ‘was warned that to add to the material in his outline would be to duplicate material appearing elsewhere in the set, while to ignore something included in the outline would be to leave it out of the set.’ Wolff quotes one of Britannica’s executive editors: ‘We really shoved it down their throats.’
This may explain why this edition sometimes reads as if it’s written by a committee, and a committee devoid of character or warmth. Geoffrey Wolff reasoned convincingly that one shouldn’t expect to have much fun with it, for it lacked eccentricity, elegance and surprise, ‘the singular qualities that make learning an inviting transaction’. He singled out the article on Gout. In the eleventh edition this ran to two and a half pages (gout provoked ‘a remarkable tendency to gnashing of the teeth’, and the parts affected ‘cannot bear the weight of the bedclothes’). There was also a fascinating if questionable moral aspect (gout was less common in countries where its citizens had fewer ‘errors in living’). ‘That’s the kind of stuff a gouty reader can take some pleasure from,’ Wolff declared. The shorter methodical entry in the fifteenth edition observes how ‘the elevation of uric acid appears to be transmitted by an autosomal gene.’*
That said, it still does what any encyclopaedia should. It carries tens of thousands of authoritative, interesting and useful articles. That’s in the general Macropaedia, the sort of encyclopaedia one has grown accustomed to over the years. But upon opening the highly exacting world of the Micropaedia we enter a very different and strange universe. One tries to apply some logic to it – by examining, for example, the fifty-six-page article on ‘Logic, The History and Kinds of’, all 70,000-plus words and equations of it – and one is left exhausted. This was not general learning, this was extreme obsession, and it was not an exception. There are hundreds of columns on such far-reaching and rather hard-to-grapple topics such as Cities (ten pages), Climate and Weather (eighty-six pages), and Continental Landforms (fifty-five pages). After Climate and Weather there are six pages on Cnidarians.*
As always, this exhaustive enterprise could be paid for in monthly instalments, the precise amount dependent on the quality of leather slapped around it. But the fifteenth edition also came with the revival of something Britannica hadn’t offered for decades – a ‘personal knowledge assistant’. If the volumes in your possession didn’t already answer everything under the sun, or didn’t provide answers in enough depth, and if the world was moving just too fast for its pages, you were entitled to call on Britannica’s Library Research Service. This had been created in 1936, and its department of ‘Answer Girls’ featured heavily in its promotions. Having fallen from favour in the 1960s, it was now being revived with vigour.*
Every purchaser received 100 coupons to be redeemed for one of two products. The first was an ‘instant response system’ by which the coupon-holder could select from 10,000 written reports that didn’t make it into either the Micropaedia or Macropaedia. The extensive catalogue included: R-201 – ‘The Value and Utilization of Poultry Manure and Deep Litter as Fertilizer and Stock Feed’; 3R-53 – ‘The Hazards of Wind Shear and Microbursts’; 3R-148 – ‘Establishing a Pecan Grove’; R-140 – ‘Zea Diploperennis and the Possibility of Breeding Perennial Corn’; and R-5662 – ‘Influences of Oriental Mysticism upon Ralph Waldo Emerson’ (to sample just the Agriculture, Aeronautics and American Literature sections).
The second research product was up to you. For ten years from the date of purchase, a Britannica owner could ask up to 100 questions ‘on matters of fact’, as many as ten questions per year. The answers to these questions would then arrive in the post, varying in length from a few lines to a few pages. It was a sort of Alexa/Siri service before its time, although it did take up to a month for any questions to be answered, and the service would be suspended in the event of a user slipping into arrears on their instalment plan, and no questions could be answered regarding personal medical or legal matters, and no research would be conducted relating to public competitions with a cash prize.
In the same interview in which he’d explained the diminution and aggrandisement of Napoleon, Dr Mortimer Adler was asked about the possibility of mistakes in his thirty-two volumes.
‘We have a vast staff of data verifiers or fact checkers,’ he said. ‘And even so, of course, errors do creep in. I would guess there may be 2000 or 3000 small errors, typographical errors, little errors of fact that we have to correct within the next printing and the printing after that. It’s impossible not to. Every encyclopaedia has errors, and it’s a constant vigilance to keep finding them and correcting them.’
‘So when will the information that a cricket pitch is ten-foot long [rather than the correct 66 feet] be corrected?’ asked the man from the BBC.
‘In the next printing! In 1975!’
The BBC man also wondered how long it would be before the new edition went out of date.
‘We think we have produced an encyclopaedia that is so flexible, and so capacious in its structure that it will accommodate any changes in knowledge in the next fifty years at least.’*
If we still have the Encyclopaedia Britannica in our homes, the fifteenth edition is probably the one we have. True to Dr Adler’s word, annual revisions continued into the late 1990s, and the set received a major overhaul in 1985. Articles were redesigned, reorganised and amalgamated, and the set expanded to thirty-two volumes, including a two-volume index that readers had suggested would have been useful when trying to negotiate the original version. The price was now about £1000 or $1500.