Book review: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia

Simon Garfield’s All the Knowledge in the World is a valentine to the monumental significance of encyclopaedias. Picture: Rod Lawton/PhotoPlus Magazine/Future via Getty Images

• All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia 
• Simon Garfield W&N, €24.99

A woman opens the door of her flat to a smiling man and asks him what he wants. When he tells her he’d like to come in and steal a few things, she asks: “Are you an encyclopaedia salesman?”

After repeatedly assuring the woman he only wants to ransack her flat and not sell her an encyclopaedia, she warily lets him in.

But once inside, the man says: “Mind you, I don’t know whether you’ve really considered the advantages of owning a really fine set of modern encyclopaedias ….”

This 1969 Monty Python sketch precisely captured the notoriety of door-to-door encyclopaedia salesmen.

By suggesting to parents that their children wouldn’t reach their potential unless they bought them encyclopaedias, these armies of travelling salesmen irreparably tarnished the ground-breaking publishing achievement of the very objects they were trying to sell.

Simon Garfield’s All the Knowledge in the World is a valentine to the monumental significance of encyclopaedias, reminding us how, until the arrival of computers, “they did more than any other single thing to shape our understanding of the world”.

Garfield’s history includes the medieval, 11,095-volume Chinese manuscript — the Yongle Dadian — that was too big to print, but his primary focus is the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

First published between 1768 and 1771, it represented an alternative university, promising readers the chance to take their place in modern society.

When the Britannica dropped its asking price by more than half at the end of the 19th century, the encyclopaedia market switched from “the margins to the mainstream”.

All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia by Simon Garfield

The 11th edition of the Britannica, published in 1910-11, represented its pinnacle, and it sold about 1m sets — more than every previous edition combined — and its devotees included Ernest Shackleton, who insisted the 29-volume encyclopaedia sustained him and his crew while battling Arctic ice during their Endurance expedition.

The Britannica’s prestige was underlined by its illustrious contributors, which included George Bernard Shaw, Sigmund Freud, Marie Curie, Alfred Hitchcock, and Albert Einstein.

Writing about the novel in 1974, Anthony Burgess gives a special mention to A Clockwork Orange … by Anthony Burgess.

Adverts in the 1960s boasted the latest Britannica was “the finest edition in 200 years”, but, in retrospect, it looked like the beginning of the end.

In 1964, the bestselling The Myth of the Britannica showed that some articles had not been changed since 1875. The Britannica’s societal attitudes were similarly outdated.

For example, from 1929 to 1973 its article on homosexuality claimed: “The death penalty itself has failed to stamp it out.”

Ultimately, the Britannica’s fate was sealed by its failure to embrace digital technology.

In 1993, Microsoft launched a CD-ROM encyclopaedia, Encarta, and today Wikipedia is the world’s largest online reference work.

Between March and May 2020, Britannica.com received 125m visits; Wikipedia attracted 17bn.

Garfield is an English non-fiction writer whose books include explorations of typography ( Just My Type) and celebrations of letter writing ( To the Letter).

Like those, All the Knowledge illustrates Garfield’s capacity to synthesise wide-ranging research and present it in a lucid, vibrant style with his characteristic eye for detail.

Mirroring his subject, Garfield arranges his book in alphabetical order and his tone is light — but also wistful for the loss of the extraordinary commitment that underpinned the project of writing encyclopaedias.

He emphasises the birth of the Britannica was inseparable from the cultural, mechanical and political revolutions happening at the time and drolly suggests these transformations inspired contradictory emotions in contemporary encyclopaedists: “delight that there was so much remarkable new material to include in every edition, and horror that there was so much remarkable new material to include in every edition”.