Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  But my favorite part of the embalming entry was a man named Martin Van Butchell and his ingenious loophole. Before I get to that, a quick detour, because loopholes deserve a little attention of their own. I’ve been keeping track of loopholes, and have come to the conclusion that humans are a sleazy, slippery, tricky, untrustworthy species. The Bible says that men of the cloth cannot take up the sword. So what’d medieval bishops do? They took up the club. They figured, apparently, that it’s perfectly okay with Jesus to bash in the head of the enemy, as long as it’s not with a long metallic blade. Speaking of religious men, monks were banned from eating meat on Friday. Somehow—and there’s no explanation of the logic behind this one—the monks decided that baby rabbits were fish. And in colonial America, legend has it that the authorities outlawed nine-pin bowling. So what’d bowling fans do? They added another pin and invented ten-pin bowling. Voilà! That’s not illegal.

  So as you can see, if there’s a law, rule, or order, someone’s going to find the loophole. Which brings us back to Martin Van Butchell. Van Butchell was a widower in 18th-century England. His wife—a wealthy lady—had specified in her will that Van Butchell could have access to her money only as long as her body was aboveground. I suppose she didn’t want him spending it on gold snuffboxes for his second wife. Problem is, when Mrs. Van Butchell died, her husband found perhaps the best loophole in the history of wills. He hired a man named John Hunter to perform one of the first arterial embalmings ever, then placed Mrs. Van Butchell’s fashionably dressed body in a glass-lidded case in a sitting room and held regular visiting hours. Her body remained, technically, aboveground, and he was free to frolic in her bank account.

  emotion

  Despite the enjoy-life-while-you-can wisdom of Ecclesiastes, I’ve been mildly depressed lately. Partly it’s because I’m exhausted—this early-morning schedule is a killer. I know I brought it on myself—no one’s threatening to kneecap me if I don’t read a hundred pages a day. Still, it’s a killer. Journalists just aren’t meant to wake up to the sunrise and Al Roker’s relentlessly cheery voice. But the real reason I’m down is that we got slammed with another negative pregnancy test the other day. I hate it. It makes life’s little annoyances—my commute, the line at the drugstore, etc.—seem especially unbearable.

  I’ve taken the offensive against the depression—I’ve become annoyed at it. I’ve decided 98 percent of depression has long outlived its Darwinian value. You ingest a dozen pages of biology every day—the evolution of crustaceans and bacteria and blood types—and you start to see everything in a Darwinian light. Even emotion. I’m not sure what the original evolutionary value of sadness was, but I can guarantee you this: mine is not helping me survive or reproduce. My freezer will still have plenty of microwave veggie lasagnas regardless of whether or not I get upset at the fourteen-minute wait for the subway. Unfortunately, this realization—brilliant as it may be—hasn’t helped me shake off the funk.

  As I dive into the Macropaedia article on emotion, I’m hoping to find some more helpful information. And sure enough, I do. There’s a snappy section on something called “facial feedback.” This is when your brain senses that your facial muscles are in a happy position, so the brain figures, Hey, I must be happy. (The brain can be remarkably stupid sometimes.) As the Britannica puts it, there is “some scientific support for the old advice ‘smile when you feel blue’ and ‘whistle a happy tune when you’re afraid.’ ”

  For the rest of the morning, as I plow through the Es, I test out some facial feedback. I force my lips into a slightly exhausting, two-hour-long fake smile. On a bathroom break, I check out my face in the mirror. It frightens me. It looks like I have electrodes in my cheeks that are zapping my face into an unnatural approximation of happiness. I look like a de-ranged elf in a horror movie about an axe-murdering Santa. But I have to say—I think it might be working. I am feeling just the tiniest bit better.

  In addition to facial feedback, I also paid close attention to the section on dealing with anger. The Britannica lists several strategies, among them:

  Confrontative coping (“stood my ground and fought”)

  Distancing (“didn’t let it get to me”)

  Planful problem solving (“changed or grew as a person”)

  Positive reappraisal

  Studies show that the first two methods—confrontation and distancing—just make people more upset. The second two—planful problem solving and positive reappraisal—make them happier. I’ve always been a distancer, a stereotypically stoic male. This is good. I’m going try out this planful problem solving.

  I decide to start with yesterday’s dustup with the Verizon phone company. That pissed me off. It involved forty-seven minutes on hold, several forms that I had filled out twice before, and an extremely patronizing tone of voice from a woman with the IQ of a five-assed abalone. How could I planfully solve this problem? After less than a minute’s thought, I figured it out. Get my assistant Genevieve to call next time. Nothing makes me feel better than delegating.

  encyclopedia

  The Britannica does not suffer from any self-esteem issues. This book is not ashamed of itself. In fact, one of the favorite topics in the Britannica is…the Britannica. Britannica editors, Britannica publishers, Britannica Chinese editions—they all get their very own entry. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy I talked to at Britannica’s CD-ROM tech support gets his own write-up soon. (Yes, it’s true—I buckled and got the Britannica CD-ROM, which I use occasionally for its search function).

  That’s not to mention the way the Britannica manages to insert itself the unlikeliest of places—as with its discussion of the hand grenade pioneer who began his hand grenade obsession after reading about the weapons in his EB. In short, if the Britannica were a teenage boy, it would be in serious danger of growing hairy palms.

  But right now, I’ve arrived at the most onanistic moment of all—the encyclopedia essay on encyclopedias. If I’m going to be spending a year with these thirty-two clunky volumes, I might as well pay attention to where the hell they came from.

  The word “encyclopedia” is derived from Greek—as you’d expect—and means a circle of learning. Plato’s nephew wrote perhaps the first circle of learning, with Pliny the Elder polishing off his own version soon after. (By the way, Pliny the Elder died investigating the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Another martyr to knowledge—we salute you!)

  Over the millennia, humans have produced an estimated two thousand encyclopedias. The award for the longest goes to China’s Yu-Hai encyclopedia, published in 1738, at a disturbing 240 volumes. The most lyrical is probably the French one from 1245, written in octosyllabic verse. The most creatively organized—I’d give that to the Spanish encyclopedia from the 15th century that was written allegorically, with a young man getting lessons from maidens named Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, and so on.

  The most historic, though, is not a matter of debate. It has to be Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which made its debut in Paris in August of 1751. I knew this was a controversial pile of books, but I had no idea exactly how big a ruckus it had made. Editors were jailed, the volumes themselves were locked up in the Bastille alongside murderers and madmen, and police scoured Paris in search of manuscripts to burn. The Encyclopédie—written by the intellectual rock stars of the day, including Voltaire and Rousseau—went out of its way to squash myths and needle the clergy, even featuring a quasi-flattering write-up of atheism. And it might have been censored completely if not for a chance dinner table conversation at King Louis XV’s palace. The king got into a squabble with his guests about the correct composition of gunpowder. The solution: they dispatched someone to track down a copy of the illegal Encyclopédie. After that, according to Voltaire, the king grudgingly tolerated the pesky volumes.

  Less than twenty years later and five hundred miles to the north—and with a lot less hullabaloo—the first edition of the mighty Britannica came off the presses in Edinburgh, Scotland. This 1768 edition had three
fathers: an obscure printer named Colin Macfarquhar; an editor named William Smellie, who in his spare time was an accomplished drunk (he liked to toss back pints with poet Robert Burns); and a buffoon named Andrew Bell, who stood four foot six and had a huge nose—but liked to wear an even bigger papier-mâché nose as a joke. Ha! Incidentally, he could pay for his wacky nose with the fortune earned from engraving fancy dog collars for the rich. They shared an interest in learning and, apparently Greek-inspired spelling (hence the ae in encyclopaedia).

  The work they produced is an odd and fascinating cocktail. I ordered a set from Britannica—you can buy reproductions, complete with fake age spots. Dip in anywhere, and you’ll get a taste of what was important to the average 18th-century Scotsman. As Herman Kogan points out in The Great EB—a remarkably detailed history of the Britannica—the first edition devotes seven lines to drama and dispenses with poetry in five hundred words. But cures for horse disease? That fills a riveting thirty-nine pages. Apparently, the Scots had some seriously unhealthy horses.

  Not counting veterinary tracts, the first Britannica can be great reading—opinionated, eccentric, occasionally cranky. Suicide, the Britannica informs its readers, is “an act of cowardice disguised as heroism.” For excessive gas, the Britannica prescribes almond oil and tobacco smoke blown up the anus. Cold baths should be taken for melancholy, madness, and the bites of mad dogs. And cats? My God, these Scotsmen were not cat people. The poor feline species inspires several hundred words of venomous prose. To give you an idea:

  Of all domestic animals, the character of the cat is the most equivocal and suspicious. He is kept, not for any amiable qualities, but purely with a view to banish rats, mice and other noxious animals from our houses…. Constantly bent upon theft and rapine, they are full of cunning and dissimulation; they conceal all their designs; seize every opportunity of doing mischief, and then fly from punishment…. In a word, the cat is totally destitute of friendship.

  Wait, there’s more. The cat is overly “amorous” (that is, horny), “torments” his prey, and generally “delights in destroying all kinds of weak animals indifferently.” Cats often pretend to sleep when “in reality they are meditating mischief.” Oh, and cat mothers “devour their offspring.”

  Well. As an unabashed cat lover, I have to disagree. Cats may not have the wide-eyed unquestioning loyalty of dogs, but they’re also not the feline equivalent of Josef Mengele. Plus, they won’t go mad and chew on your leg, forcing you to take cold baths. (By the way, the current Britannica seems to have gotten over its cat issues; the 2002 edition says that “the cat’s independent personality, grace, cleanliness and subtle displays of affection have wide appeal.” Much better spin.)

  The first edition of Britannica clocks in at only three volumes. Oddly, the erudite Scottish boys had an obsession with the letters A and B; those two get an entire volume all to themselves. The rest of the alphabet is crammed into the remaining two volumes. Apparently, Smellie and friends got a little bored of their project midway through and decided it would be more fun to go to the tavern with Robert Burns. The letter Z is lucky to get mentioned at all.

  The first edition became a moderate hit, selling about three thousand copies, according to The Great EB. Soon after, pirated editions were printed in America, available to the colonists for $6. Among those who bought a set were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The official second edition came out in 1777. Smellie declined to edit this one, so his replacement was another hard-drinking Scotsman, named James Tytler. Tytler’s other claim to fame: an early fan of hot-air ballooning, he reputedly made love to a dentist’s daughter on a flight, thus earning himself what some say is the very first membership in the mile-high club.

  Since then, the Britannica has climbed its way on up to the fifteenth edition—an edition being defined as a top-to-bottom rewrite—which debuted in 1974. That’s the edition I have on my mustard-colored shelf right now. Sales of the fifteenth have dropped since the glory days of the eighties. And astute home owners will notice that Britannica salesmen no longer tap on their doors—they were nixed in 1994. (Incidentally, star salesmen of yore include the founder of Sharper Image and the father of comedian Mike Myers.) But sales have stabilized recently, thanks mostly to schools and libraries, which replenish their sets regularly.

  As you might expect, the big growth spurt has come on the electronic side—the Internet, CD-ROM, and DVDs—which now make up about half of the Britannica’s business. Yes, Microsoft’s Encarta is the market leader, the Nike sneakers of the encyclopedia world. But the Britannica’s business is big enough to support a staff of five hundred worldwide who diligently revise the articles. In the last couple of years, they’ve tweaked about a third of the 65,000 entries in ways large and small.

  The shifting Britannica text is fascinating to me. The first couple of editions are works of art, but I love to read any and all vintage editions. They’re always a snapshot of the age, each revealing its own delightful and disturbing prejudices. My friend Tom, a writer at Esquire, has a volumes A through Q of the 1941 Britannica. He rescued them one day when he was poking around the garbage dump at Shelter Island, but had to abandon volumes R through Z because they were too stained with burrito juice. In that edition, Herman Melville got a dismissive little write-up—some minor American writer with a weakness for turgid prose who squeezed out a couple of decent nautically-themed books. Apparently, the Melville renaissance hadn’t hit the Britannica offices in 1941.

  You can find good stuff even in those editions from just twenty years ago. The library at Esquire has the 1980 Britannica, which I peeked at, only to find what is probably the strangest passage ever published in Britannica’s history. It’s about John Adams, in the section on his retirement, and it says he spent his old age “enjoying his tankard of hard cider each morning before breakfast” and “rejoicing at the size of his manure pile.” Now, it’s moderately strange that the second president of the United States was sloshed before breakfast. But that he derived joy from the size of a pile of excrement? I just don’t know how to interpret that. It occurs to me, though, that this might make for a nice monument to this American hero—a marble replica of his twenty-foot-high manure collection. Take that, Mount Rushmore!

  And speaking of classic Britannica, we can’t neglect the most classic of them all: the eleventh edition, from 1911. As any book-obsessed dweeb will tell you, this was the greatest encyclopedia ever produced. This is the edition that has not one but two Web sites devoted to it—1911encyclopedia.org and classiceb.com. Granted, Ashton Kutcher has a few more, but still, for an encyclopedia, that’s not bad.

  What made it so momentous? Partly, it was the contributors. This edition was written by hundreds of heavyweight experts, including scientist T. H. Huxley, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, poet Algernon Swinburne, and revolutionary Petr Kropotkin, who wrote the anarchy entry from his London jail cell. But the impressive roster alone doesn’t quite explain the cult of the eleventh—especially since many of those essays were left over from previous editions. Plus, the real blockbuster names wouldn’t come until the thirteenth edition (Houdini wrote on magic, Freud on psychoanalysis, and Einstein on physics).

  You could also argue that the eleventh’s appeal comes from its literary style—the prose is wonderful, occasionally worthy of a novel. Consider Lord Macaulay’s essay on Samuel Johnson, which contained passages like this one, about Johnson’s depression: “The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct line, or with its own pure splendour. The rays had to struggle through a disturbing medium; they reached him refracted, dulled and discoloured by the thick gloom which had settled on his soul, and, though they might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to cheer him.” The man could write.

  Still, the literary style doesn’t quite explain the eleventh’s unique appeal, either. To really understand what’s going on, your best bet is to consult a 1981 New Yorker article by Hans Koning called “Onward and Upward with the Arts: The
Eleventh Edition.” This was when magazine articles were almost as long as the Britannica itself; if his piece appeared today, it would probably be squeezed into a three-sentence photo caption. Koning starts his opus with a primer on encyclopedias in general (part of which I referred to above). He then makes his argument: that the eleventh was the culmination of the Enlightenment, the last great work of the Age of Reason, the final instance when all human knowledge could be presented with a single point of view. Four years later, the confidence and optimism that had produced the eleventh would be, as Koning puts it, “a casualty in the slaughter at Ypres and the Argonne.”

  The eleventh edition was a work in which civilization would soon conquer every corner of the earth, a book that predicted the “lessening of international jealousies.” This was a book, says Koning, where reason ruled and great deeds were done by great and logical men, not the result of irrational forces or luck. Having read a bit of the eleventh, I think he’s right. That’s where the real appeal lies—nostalgia for a world where it all made sense, where all was knowable, where one point of view was the correct one.

  Of course, as Koning points out, this point of view had an ugly side: it was racist as all hell. “The negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and to be more closely related to the highest anthropoids.” Haitians are “ignorant and lazy” and the natives of the Philippines are “physical weaklings…with large clumsy feet.”

  The EB has since weeded out racism. But having read eight thousand pages, I still notice the tone that Koning talks about. The volume has been turned down, but it’s still there: the world of the EB is still one that treats everything rationally and sensibly, that still believes in the overall progress of civilization. As worldviews go, it may be deluded—but I like it. It’s better than the alternative.