Perhaps – out of curiosity, or because we felt sorry for it just lying there – we might even consult the monolith from time to time. What we would never do, unless we were crazy, is read it in its entirety.
Step forward the enthusiastic A.J. Jacobs. In 2003, much to the amusement and then consternation of his wife, he undertook to tackle the literary equivalent of the north face of the Eiger, reading the fifteenth edition complete and unabridged in a year. Jacobs, a writer on Esquire, hoped to achieve two goals: reduce his television consumption, and in the process ‘become the smartest person in the world’. He then achieved a third goaclass="underline" writing an amusing book about his challenge. He revels in the joys of learning, although often plays the clown:
‘I’m completely ignorant of this man,’ he writes of Petrarch, ‘but he sounds like someone I should know about.’ He concludes that Petrarch’s devotion to his chaste love Laura would today be called stalking and result in a restraining order. He throws in a large amount of pop-culture gags and interjections from family and friends. He reads the entry on Plato on a train journey with his wife Julie to see her brother Doug in Philadelphia. If that isn’t too much information in a book about information, we also learn that his wife’s rash has cleared up. This is clearly a running gag, but there is no cross-referencing.*
A.J. Jacobs was not the first to attempt a complete read. George Bernard Shaw claimed he had studied most of Britannica’s ninth in the British Museum reading room, although he admitted to glossing over some of the science articles. The son of the novelist C.S. Forester remembers his father reading Britannica in bed, a physical as well as a literary achievement; in fact, he may have read the whole thing three times. A man called George Forman Goodyear, a lawyer in Buffalo, New York, took twenty-two years to read the complete fourteenth edition; the pioneering heart surgeon Michael DeBakey read the whole of the eleventh in his teens; Aldous Huxley apparently read the whole of the fourteenth, but randomly. He focused on a particular volume, and would then amuse a party crowd by his knowledge of things beginning with the letter N or P. And in 1934 the New Yorker reported on a man called A. Urban Shirk. Shirk was the advertising and sales manager of the International Products Corporation, which apparently isn’t a made-up name, and in his spare time on lonely business trips, Shirk liked nothing more than reading the fourteenth. He spent two to six months on each volume, and was currently up to Volume 4 (Brai to Cast). If some of the entries seemed familiar to him it was because he had already spent four and a half years reading the whole of the twenty-nine-volume eleventh edition.
UPMANSHIP (a diversion …)
For those unfamiliar with what people with greying hair like to call ‘the golden age of British television’, The Two Ronnies were Ronnie Barker (rotund, bumbling, professorial) and Ronnie Corbett (petite, pernickety, anecdotal). As comedians they were peak-time and family friendly, and they loved lexicography, spoonerisms and good puns. When, in 1975, a year after the latest Britannica, they pilloried the dreaded encyclopaedia salesman, they chose not to target the hapless soul himself, for he was just spreading knowledge and making ends meet, but instead something broader, and something all British viewers would understand: the class system. And like Python before them, they succeeded in undercutting all expectations.
The scene is a clichéd depiction of a northern working-class front room. A wife called Elsie is at the ironing board in curlers, a husband in a vest called Arthur is pumping the tyres on his upturned bike; all that’s missing is a whippet. A knock on the door reveals a hatted, raincoated salesman with a chirpy greeting. He is the middle-class invasion, probably from the south.
Ronnie Corbett (as the salesman): ‘Good morning, Sonny! Is your mummy in?’
Arthur is played by Ronnie Barker. It’s safe to assume that no one has called him ‘Sonny’ for at least forty years.
‘It’s another one of them sales, m’love,’ he calls to his wife in the front room.
The salesman enters and wonders whether he can interest them in a nice set of encyclopaedias. Each volume is full of very interesting information. For example, did they know that Siberian Lake Balkhash has an area of no less than 7050 square miles?
‘Yes.’ Arthur says as he returns to his bicycle.
Well how about the fact that the Yangtze Kiang is some 3400 miles long?
Yes, he knew that too.
Fine, but did he know that the highest mountain in South America was Mount Illampu at 3012 feet?
‘I think you’re wrong there, lad,’ Arthur says. ‘The highest mountain in South America is surely Mount Aconcagua, isn’t it? Which is over 69 feet higher than the Illampu, isn’t that right, our Elsie?’
Our Elsie disagrees – she thinks it’s Mount Cotopaxi. Luckily, their daughter Lily has just entered the room to settle the matter.
‘Oh, you’re not on that one again, are you?’ she asks as she settles in the easy chair to file her nails. ‘It’s Mount Chimborazo.’
This goes on for a while. The salesman has various other items to tease them with. Who said ‘Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage’? How does the diameter of Neptune compare with that of Earth? Name the dwarf monkey that lives in the Amazonian mountains and feeds on small flowers, roots and small birds. The window cleaner outside the parlour window, for some reason on a ladder on the ground floor, chips in with the answer: it’s the white-eared marmoset.
There is also mention of a neighbour named Mrs Butterworth, who recently ‘proved the existence of a fourth dimension’. The salesman, increasingly infuriated, begins ripping up pages from the book in his hands. He says he hasn’t sold one all week.
But then there’s a twist. Arthur says he’ll buy a set.
And then another twist: the salesman says the cost is £2 a week for five weeks, but Arthur, Elsie and Lily can’t agree what that will be in total. It may be £10, but it may also be £7.
* The Fifteenth was the edition I picked up from Cambridge in the Introduction.
* By the time the fifteenth edition was launched, Britannica had been an American publication for about sixty years. For decades it had been owned by Sears, Roebuck and Co., the mail order company based in Chicago, and then by a private charitable trust, the William Benton Foundation, which endowed the University of Chicago with Britannica’s proceeds.
* BBC Nationwide, 16 January 1974, interview by Christopher Rainbow.
* ‘Britannica 3, History Of’ by Geoffrey Wolff, the Atlantic, June 1974. Wolff’s essay also revealed how carefully the Britannica board kept their plans for the new edition secret not only from its competitors but also from much of its own sales force; it was important they continued to sell the fourteenth edition just a few weeks before it was superseded. Of course, present-day computer and mobile phone companies do much the same thing.
* I had to read the entry to find out: cnidarians are a particular type of aquatic animal comprising polyp and medusa, the latter commonly known as jellyfish. The more one wrote, the more one got paid, of course. The usual rate was 10 cents per word, and major contributors also received a complete edition when published.
* At its peak the Library Research Service employed more than 100 women producing about 100,000 reports. The attendant publicity material described a glamorous life, with many employees travelling from city to city by train in the interests of research, picking up a special Britannica typewriter left by a previous researcher at a railway station locker.