by A. J. Jacobs
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 Encyclopedie, 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 Encyclopedie--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 Encyclopedie. 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-mache 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.
Engels, Friedrich
Back to my 2002 edition, and Friedrich Engels. I'd always thought of Engels as the lesser half of the Marx-Engels team, sort of a 19th-century revolutionary Garfunkel. But in a way, Engels is more interesting than his better-known compatriot.
What I love about Engels is his capacity to lead a double life. Born to a plush existence--his father owned a cotton plant in Manchester and a textile factory in Prussia--Engels spent the better part of thirty years in the family trade. During the day, he was an effective German businessman, crunching his numbers, closing his deals. But after hours, Engels wrote spittle-emitting articles against the evils of capitalism.
To outward appearances, he seemed quite well adjusted. As the Britannica says, "He joined a choral society, frequented the famed Ratskeller, became an expert swimmer and practiced fencing and riding (he outrode most Englishmen in the foxhunts)." That has got to be one of the most startling images I've encountered in Britannica, second only to John Adams's manure pile: the cofounder of modern communism astride a gelding, all decked out in a red jacket and jodhpurs, shouting "Tally ho!" with a German accent. Then, presumably, Engels would go home, take a bath, and scribble screeds urging textile factory workers to string up their evil foxhunting capitalist bosses. Eventually, Engels got promoted to partner in the Manchester cotton plant, where he continued to bring home the knockwurst, "never allowing his communist principles and criticism of capitalist ways to interfere with the profitable operations of his firm." By the way, in between his fomenting and his foxhunting, Engels found time to learn twenty-four languages.
So there's Engels for you--the ultimate limousine liberal. It reminded me of this guy I knew in college. He was an avowed manifesto-quoting communist, but his dad was some fancy Washington lobbyist. You could just tell this guy grew up in an enormous house filled with Latin American domestics and an intercom system to connect the various wings. When I first visited his dorm room, I remember complimenting him on his lovely colossal poster of Vladimir Lenin. He thanked me, then told me how proud he was of the frame he had selected--it was mahogany, if I recall correctly. A professionally framed poster of Lenin. For the same price he could have bought three tractors for a Minsk turnip farm.
In Engels's case, though, his ability to live with a surreal contradiction worked out nicely. If Engels wasn't a corporate drone by day, he wouldn't have had the cash to send to that moocher Marx. Without his allowance, Marx wouldn't have had the time to formulate his revolutionary theories, Russia might never have gone communist, and Warren Beatty would never have written the screenplay for Reds. So the Britannica has taught me that hypocrisy can be effective. Of course, it might have been better if Engels hadn't endorsed a totally flawed social system, but you can't have everything.
Enigma
"Device used by the German military command to encode strategic messages before and during World War II. The Enigma code was first broken by the Poles in the early 1930s." See? The Poles aren't so dumb. Another stereotype busted by the Britannica. (A stereotype, by the way, is a printing plate. I never knew that one).
eraser
Good thing I didn't take more ecstasy during my college years. I need all the brain cells I have. This became apparent during a conversation with Julie a couple of days after our party. She asked me how I was liking the Hanukkah present she had given me.
"The one at your office."
I blanked. A Hanukkah present I brought to work? What the hell was it? My mind is so packed with bauxite formations and Cameroonian cities and 19th-century composers that it's elbowing out everything else in my life.
"I'm loving it!" I said.
But I gave myself away with that two-second delay.
"You don't know what it is, do you?"
"Yes, I do."
"What?"
"Um, a Frisbee?" I guessed.
She laughed--which was a relief.
"You got too much in your keppe."
Turned out it was an aromatherapy candle that smelled like grass. And I was liking it quite a bit--that much I remembered.
It's not just Hanukkah gifts I'm forgetting. It's my beloved facts. The new ones are pushing out the old ones. Here's a demoralizing story: Back in the early Es, I read about the scientist who pioneered the study of how humans forget information over time; he invented a curve to describe the phenomenon. When I read that entry, I said to myself, I'm going to make an effort not to forget this man's name.
Well, yesterday--about two weeks after I'd made that vow--I tried to remember his name. I couldn't come up with it. I knew it was an E name, but nothing else. Ironic, no? I looked in my notes and figured it out. It's Ebbinghaus. Hermann Ebbinghaus and his famous "forgetting curve."
I said before that I was remembering a lot more than I thought I would. That's true. But I'm also forgetting a lot more. This seems paradoxical, but you have to understand--I just didn't grasp the huge cubic volume of information I'd be ingesting. So I both remember more and forget more than I anticipated. There's that much information.
But man, what a world I've forgotten. I've forgotten more than many people have learned their whole lives. I've forgotten a small stadium of historical figures. I've forgotten a couple of zoos' worth of animals. I've forgotten a continent's worth of towns, and equations to fill a thousand blackboards.
