You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  TITLE: Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres

  COMPILER: Denis Diderot (1713–84) and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83)

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, from a to Zzuéné

  PUBLISHED: Paris, 1751–72; index 1780

  VOLUMES: 28 (17 of text, 11 of illustrations) + 5 vols. supplement

  PAGES: 18,000

  ENTRIES: 71,818

  ILLUSTRATIONS: 2,885

  TOTAL WORDS: 20 million

  SIZE: 15½″ × 9½″ (39.5 × 24.5 cm)

  AREA: 18,600 ft2 (1,742 m2)

  WEIGHT: 246 lb. (112 kg)

  PRICE: 280 livres to subscribers

  Two works lay out the principles: Diderot’s Proposals, published separately before the rest of the book, and d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse, published at the beginning of volume 1. Diderot grandly said the book would “serve all the purposes of a library for a professional man on any subject apart from his own,”10 and d’Alembert justified the project as a whole. The Preliminary Discourse in particular is a manifesto—not merely for a reference book, but for the whole of the intellectual enterprise known as the Enlightenment. It is a discourse on method, “an adjustment of the rationalist spirit of Descartes to the empiricism of Locke and Newton—a fusion of traditions which lies at the foundation of the Encyclopedia.”11

  The Preliminary Discourse opens with humanity’s instincts for self-preservation and natural desire for knowledge. D’Alembert distinguished the things we can know with certainty from the things we can know with probability, the things that must be true from the things that happen to be true. He then turned to what he called an “art”—“any system of knowledge which can be reduced to positive and invariable rules independent of caprice or opinion”12—and distinguished the “liberal” from the “mechanical” arts—those that can be performed by the mind and those that are performed by hand.

  Having laid out the first principles on which the arts were founded, the encyclopedists began their survey of all of human knowledge. The Encyclopédie’s seventy thousand articles were written by the leading figures of the Enlightenment: Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and d’Holbach were all among the encyclopédistes. “The encyclopedic arrangement of our knowledge,” they wrote, “consists of collecting knowledge into the smallest area possible and of placing the philosopher at a vantage point … high above the vast labyrinth, whence he can perceive the principal sciences and the arts simultaneously.”13

  The first two volumes appeared together in 1751, and the production was messy. Different sizes of capital letters are used for headwords, apparently without rhyme or reason. “In the typographical tangle of the Encyclopédie,” wrote one critic, “titles occasionally appear italicized in upper case, italicized and in lower case, or in a combination of words in capital letters and lower case words, either italicized or not italicized.” Some articles are signed with the names of their contributors, but many were not, and while it was once assumed that Diderot was responsible for all the unsigned articles, it now appears that there was nothing systematic about the practice.14

  At first glance, there is nothing especially revolutionary about the articles. In volume 8, for instance, published in 1765, there are entries on the hypotenuse (“the longest side of a right triangle … The word is Greek, from πὸ, under, and τενω, extend”), Janéiro (“South American river on the coast of Brazil”), Iliad (“name of an epic poem, the first and most perfect of those that Homer wrote. See EPIC”), imitation (“It is the artistic representation of an object. Blind nature imitates nothing; it is art that imitates”), immeubles (“These are fixed goods that have a known location, and that cannot be transported to another place”), and so on. The very long entry imprimerie ‘printing press’ is typical of the focus on the skilled trades. It opens with a definition of printing before moving into a long discussion of the history of printing with movable type, an account of technical aspects such as justification, the roles of the compositor and proofreader, an account of the differences in printing folio, quarto, octavo, and duodecimo, and so on.

  And yet a more careful look at that same volume reveals content that made the authorities nervous: as John Lough notes, “passages reflecting the outlook of the Enlightenment are hidden away in the most unlikely places.”15 The articles on ignorance and illusion, for instance, are illuminating glances into Enlightenment ideas about the source of knowledge. While a less heterodox work might explain ignorance and illusion in religious terms—becoming enlightened means approaching biblical truth—the encyclopédistes had a strictly secular conception of these matters. And it gets more explicit still. That same volume includes an article for Jésuite, and although it opens with a declaration that there is no original research here—“We say nothing here ourselves. This article is just a brief and faithful summary of accounts given in court”—in fact it is a devastating portrait of fanatical and bloodthirsty zealots. The entry on Jésus-Christ is less direct; the encyclopédistes could not blaspheme the Savior. They could, however, get in more subtle digs: “Jesus Christ, founder of the Christian religion. We can call this religion the best philosophy”—not that it is the best, only that we can call it that. The early Christians come across as narrow-minded: “I don’t know why the early disciples of Jesus criticized Platonism … Doesn’t every system of philosophy have some truths?” The Church Fathers were also “sometimes embarrassed by logical fallacies, and their arguments were unsound”—and of course “They have contempt for reason and science.”

  The book’s revolutionary project was noticed, and conservatives, especially in the Church, were alarmed. The authors went through the motions of disavowing heresy. D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse, for instance, flirts with danger in speaking of “however absurd a religion might be”—but then tries to dodge responsibility with the parenthetical qualification “(a reproach which only impiety can make of ours).”16 And while they insisted that priests should be telling us nothing about this world—that is the business of humanity—they were careful to acknowledge the existence of a creator, to avoid problems with the Church.

  No one was fooled. Friends in high places staved off prosecution for a while, but when that protection was exhausted, the civil and ecclesiastical authorities were out for blood, and they took action against not only the contributors but the book itself. The police organized burnings of the manuscripts, and subscribers were ordered to surrender their copies to the nearest post office. Copies of the book were locked in the Bastille as if they were themselves criminals.17 Nevertheless, the contributors continued working clandestinely. In fact, the scandal attracted kindred souls as contributors to the later volumes. But the whole project became much riskier. D’Alembert largely withdrew, remaining involved only on uncontroversial entries on mathematical subjects.

  More than one critic has summarized the influence of the Encyclopédie on French thought. It promoted skepticism about traditional claims, willingness to question the authority of both the Church and the state, discontent with the status quo, and determination to make the world better through the application of reason. And soon these very qualities would shake the foundations of the French nation. Though it would be foolish to offer any monocausal explanation for an epochal event in world history, it is hard to overstate the significance of the Encyclopédie in turning society upside down in 1789. Entries such as peuple ‘people’, droit naturel ‘natural right’, and autorité politique ‘political authority’ offered new ways to think about statecraft. “Seventeen years after completion of publication,” wrote Koning, “and as an unmistakable sequel, came the French Revolution.”18

  A work much less interesting in its first incarnation became the more successful franchise. The Encyclopædia Britannica (1768–71) was Britain’s answer to the Encyclopédie.

  The Encyclopædia Britannica was not the first Britannic encyclopedia, but the story in Great Britain is differe
nt from the story on the Continent. Although colossal works of profound erudition were all the rage in seventeenth-century Europe, the English got in on the act late, in 1704, when the clergyman John Harris published his Lexicon Technicum; or, An Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Explaining Not Only the Terms of Art, but the Arts Themselves. The alphabetical arrangement and the large scale (8,200 entries) were new in Britain, and the emphasis on science and technology was new anywhere. “Technical Harris,” as he was called, may have begun the practice of tapping experts to contribute to encyclopedias, since one entry was written by Isaac Newton—though it is also possible that he simply plagiarized Newton without permission.19 He and Ephraim Chambers satisfied British readers for much of the eighteenth century, but when the Encyclopédie appeared, the British knew at once that they were outclassed. They decided they needed a comparable work with systematic coverage of all areas of knowledge.

  Like L’Encyclopédie, the project began as the brainchild of publishers, this time Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, based in Edinburgh. The location is important: coming out of Scotland, this was a British project, not an English one. The political entity called Great Britain was only a few decades old, and the Britannica embraced the Union and celebrated a British identity founded on liberty. Macfarquhar and Bell hired another Scot, William Smellie, to do the real work. The son of an architect, Smellie was born in 1740 in the suburbs of Edinburgh. He received a classical education at his grammar school, but had to leave school at the age of twelve. He was then put to work as the apprentice to a stay maker, constructing women’s undergarments from whalebone. He found the work distasteful and was glad when he got a job as a proofreader. It was a good position for an autodidact, who had taught himself sciences and languages and even became a founding member of the Newtonian Society, an Edinburgh club that promoted literary and especially scientific learning. At the time he was “as devoted to whiskey as to scholarship,”20 but he seems to have kept his drinking under control while he worked on the book.

  On June 8, 1768, the publishers issued a prospectus seeking subscribers for a work of one hundred weekly installments, to begin in November of that year. Each twenty-four-page number would cost sixpence; the well-off could spend an extra twopence for high-grade paper.21 (Those who paid the surcharge were probably disappointed, since the printing of the whole set was sloppy; the page numbering was often wrong, and at one point two hundred page numbers were skipped.)

  Even Smellie’s most ardent defenders had to admit that his was not a work of profound original research. His biographer wrote that he “used to say jocularly, that he had made a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences with a pair of scissors, clipping out from various books a quantum sufficit of matter for the printer.” Far from denying his dependence on other sources, he advertised his wide reading in more than 150 books. He claims to have “had recourse to the best books upon almost every subject, extracted the useful parts, and rejected whatever appeared trifling or less interesting.” In fact he seems to have cited some books that he never actually read, relying on secondhand summaries.22

  TITLE: Encyclopædia Britannica; or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Compiled upon a New Plan: In Which the Different Sciences and Arts are Digested into Distinct Treatises or Systems; and the Various Technical Terms, &c. Are Explained

  COMPILER: William Smellie (1740–95)

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, Aa to zygophyllum, with eighteen very long “treatises” and many short entries

  PUBLISHED: First in 100 weekly parts beginning in January 1768, then in three volumes, Edinburgh: Printed for A. Bell and C. Macfarquhar and sold by Colin Macfarquhar at this printing-office, Nicolson-street, 1771

  VOLUMES: 3

  PAGES: 2,382

  ENTRIES: 18,600

  TOTAL WORDS: 2.6 million

  SIZE: 10″ × 8″ (25.4 × 20.3 cm)

  AREA: 1,314 ft2 (122.8m2)

  WEIGHT: 13¾ lb. (6.3kg)

  PRICE: £2 10s. (£3 7s. on fine paper)

  LATEST EDITION: 15th ed., 1974, 32 vols., approx. 40 million words

  About a third of the Encyclopædia is taken up by eighteen long entries called “treatises”: agriculture, algebra, anatomy, arithmetic, astronomy, bookkeeping, botany, chemistry, farriery (caring for horses), geometry, law, medicine, metaphysics, midwifery, moral philosophy, music, navigation, and surgery.23 The rest of the entries were very brief, most no more than fifteen lines. Some subjects were omitted altogether: there were no biographical entries at all. There was plenty about falconry but nothing about historical method. As Smellie put it in his preface, “Utility ought to be the principal intention of every publication. Wherever this intention does not plainly appear, neither the books nor their authors have the smallest claim to the approbation of mankind.”24 That is characteristic of the British approach to practicality, and Smellie’s biographer explained that the Newtonian Society was named “in honour of the immortal NEWTON, the author, so to speak, of the true science of nature, as founded upon observation and rigid mathematical induction, in opposition to the wild theories of DESCARTES and others.”25 British common sense trumps airy-fairy French theorizing.

  Unlike the Encyclopédie, the Britannica is conventional in its religious beliefs. And even though it was created by a Scot during the Scottish Enlightenment, the radical figures who played such a large role in that movement were absent from the Britannica. Unlike the freethinkers of the French Enlightenment, the Scots at the helm of Britannica had no interest in tearing down old structures of knowledge. That is not to say religious subjects were avoided entirely. Islam received a great deal of attention; the entry Mahometans is seventeen pages long, and the articles on Alcoran (that is, the Qur’an), caliph, hegira, and mosque are clear, thoughtful, and, by the standards of the age, reasonably impartial.26 The only entry that seems to have stirred real controversy in its day was the long treatise on midwifery, with its associated illustrations. According to some sources, moralists were scandalized by the explicit gynecological details and urged readers to tear out the offending pages.

  Considering the book’s monumental importance over the next two and a half centuries, we know frustratingly little about what early readers made of it. None of the great writers of the day—James Boswell, David Hume, Adam Smith—left any comments on the first edition of the Britannica, and the few comments we do have by others are mostly negative. Sales, though, were apparently good enough to warrant London reprints in 1773 and 1775, for a total of maybe three thousand sets.27

  The Encyclopédie was a one-off—no one has ever had the temerity to produce Encyclopédie II. The book’s influence can be measured not in the number of subsequent editions but in terms of the skeptical, Enlightenment-friendly conception of the world that emerged from it, and it may well have contributed to the collapse of the Ancien Régime.

  The compilers of the Britannica, on the other hand, had more modest ambitions than those of Diderot and d’Alembert, but their book has stayed alive. The first edition was seriously flawed by any measure, but its sales were enough to lead to a second edition, which introduced biography. It was so successful that it was promptly pirated in an American edition (with the offensive word Britannica and the dedication to the hated George III omitted). By the time of the third edition in eighteen volumes (1788–97), it was much larger than any other English-language encyclopedia, and it began to feature entries contributed by experts in various disciplines.28 The book continued to grow. Britannica hit twenty-two volumes and 17,801 pages with the seventh edition of 1842. Meliora, a quarterly review, was rapturous about the eighth edition, calling it “the greatest collection of literary wealth ever compiled… . Three hundred and forty writers … have united their learning to make this gigantic store-house of knowledge. The possession of such a work is a library, for its matter is equal to one hundred ordinary octavo volumes. No library of English literature is complete without this Encyclopaedia.”29 Britannica connoisseurs are especially enamored of the ele
venth edition (published November 1910), which continues to sell briskly on the secondhand market.

  CHAPTER 13 ½

  DICTIONARY OR ENCYCLOPEDIA?

  This book uses terms like dictionary, encyclopedia, thesaurus, atlas, and so on, on the assumption that readers will be able to tell them apart. Usually it’s easy. Two reference genres, though, are disconcertingly close to each other: the dictionary and the encyclopedia.

  Dictionaries are traditionally about words and encyclopedias about things, but many works we would call encyclopedias were originally published as dictionaries or lexicons (such as John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum of 1704, the New Royal and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences of 1769–71, and, across the Channel, Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique of 1697), and many works called themselves by both names apparently interchangeably (such as Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences and the Encyclopædia Britannica; or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences of 1771).

  Still, we can make some generalizations. Entries in encyclopedias tend to be longer than those in dictionaries, and encyclopedias usually cover just nouns, while dictionaries cover all the parts of speech. Some say a dictionary cannot be translated into another language, whereas an encyclopedia can be. Whether or not that definition will hold up to serious scrutiny, it’s not a bad test. Dictionaries also tend to exclude proper nouns (people, places), unless in appendixes.