by Jack Lynch
The best salesmen got very good at it. They were selling not books but a lifestyle, a future, a promise of social mobility. Having Britannica on the shelves proved the family was cultivated, literate, and curious, even if, a month or two after the set was delivered, odd volumes were serving as a baby’s booster seat or propping up uneven table legs. One Britannica salesman, J. S. Dalton, became legendary in company lore. He once ran his car off the road and barely escaped while it was hanging over a cliff. Two other motorists stopped, pulled him to safety, and saved his life. In the time it took for help to arrive, Dalton managed to sell one of them a complete set of encyclopedias.9
The sales pitch could be assertive—encyclopedias were sold by high-pressure hucksters, not always remarkable for their honesty and integrity. Britannica paid no salaries, leaving the sales force to live entirely on commissions.10 All sorts of improper means were used to get the foot in the door, and all sorts of promises made that the salesman had no expectation of keeping. The best—or worst?—of the sales force could teach a thing or two to The Music Man’s Harold Hill: Yessir, order now and get the dee-luxe one-hundred-percent gen-yoo-wine faux leatherette binding.
Sellers found all sorts of ways to mislead potential buyers, like pretending to be taking surveys or distributing raffle tickets.11 Even when the pitches weren’t outright lies, the pressure could be unseemly. Not buying an encyclopedia? Well, ma’am, if you’re the type of mother who isn’t concerned for her child’s future, I suppose there’s nothing I can do to change that … The spirit of the era is caught in an all-too-accurate Monty Python sketch, in which a man seeks to enter a woman’s apartment by pretending to be a thief:
SALESMAN:
Burglar, madam.
WOMAN:
What do you want?
SALESMAN:
I want to come in and steal a few things, madam.
WOMAN:
Are you an encyclopaedia salesman?
SALESMAN:
No madam, I’m a burglar, I burgle people.
WOMAN:
I think you’re an encyclopaedia salesman.
SALESMAN:
Oh, I’m not. Open the door, let me in, please.
WOMAN:
If I let you in you’ll sell me encyclopaedias.
SALESMAN:
I won’t, madam! I just want to come in and ransack the flat. Honestly.
The moment she opens the door, he begins: “Mind you, I don’t know whether you’ve really considered the advantages of owning a really fine set of modern encyclopaedias …” In the United States it got bad enough that in 1972, the Federal Trade Commission lodged a complaint against several encyclopedia publishers for deceptive practices. A 1978 ruling determined that they were indeed breaking the law. A series of rulings led to a new regime: sales representatives had to declare immediately that they were selling encyclopedias.12 But the age of door-to-door sales was nearly at an end. Britannica watched its market fall apart with the arrival of online resources. In the 1970s they had more than two thousand door-to-door sales people selling $2,000 sets of encyclopedias across the country. World Book, even more assertive, had forty-five thousand door-to-door representatives by the late 1980s.13 But by 1996—the year when the last one thousand door-to-door salespeople were laid off—Britannica’s sales had fallen by 60 percent.14
Britannica was not ready for the electronic age, and they stumbled badly—but then so have many publishers. Print sales of multivolume reference books are all but dead, and the industry is still struggling to figure out how to make money online. Some dictionaries and encyclopedias are prepared by national academies or other organizations that can write off the loss as a public service. Many reference publishers have given up on marketing to individuals and count on university libraries for all their sales. Others charge monthly or annual fees, though competing with free services like Wikipedia and Dictionary.com is not easy. Others still provide free access and depend on advertising revenue. Even the free services sometimes have to beg for spare change, as when Wikipedia goes on public-television-inspired fundraising drives. Which plan will win? It is the biggest unanswered question in the reference world today.
CHAPTER 24
FULL AND AUTHORITATIVE INFORMATION
Doctrine for the Modern World
The Catholic Encyclopedia
1907–14
Bol’shaia sovetskaia
entsiklopediia
1926–47
Many reference books end up with an authority they never sought for themselves. We consider “the dictionary” the authoritative word on language, and we feel something must be true if it’s in an encyclopedia. Few lexicographers or encyclopedists want that authority, but it is often thrust on them nonetheless. A few reference books, though, demand to be treated with deference and claim to lay down the law.
The early twentieth century was a rough time for doctrine, and traditional belief systems were increasingly challenged. The process began in the European Enlightenment and picked up steam over the revolutionary era of the early nineteenth century. Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, and Freud demolished old certainties. By the end of the nineteenth century, one conventional piety after another had been challenged, discredited, or simply ignored.
The Catholic Encyclopedia was compiled to meet a need: orthodoxy was under attack. At the beginning of the twentieth century, prominent Roman Catholics were concerned that other encyclopedias were not merely indifferent to this attack, but actually aiding the forces of evil with their own anti-Catholic bias. Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie had enraged many, and the Catholic Church was high on the list of aggrieved parties. It responded by putting the Encyclopédie on the Index expurgatorius in 1759 and nearly excommunicating Diderot. And while the great encyclopedia from the other side of the Channel was less radical in its freethinking tendencies, Catholics pointed out that the Encyclopædia Britannica treated only Protestantism with respect, while “Roman Catholicism receives more censure than Judaism.”1
TITLE: The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church
COMPILER: Charles George Herbermann (1840–1916), Edward A. Pace (1861–1938), Condé Benoist Pallen (1858–1929), Thomas Joseph Shahan (1857–1932), and John J. Wynne (1859–1948)
ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, Aachen to Zwirner
PUBLISHED: New York: Robert Appleton Company, March 1907–April 1914
VOLUMES: 17
PAGES: 13,600
ENTRIES: 9,700
TOTAL WORDS: 19 million
SIZE: 10½″ × 7½″ (26.5 × 19 cm)
AREA: 7,300 ft2 (685 m2)
WEIGHT: 112 lb. (51 kg)
PRICE: $90 for buckram binding, $120 for ¾ morocco, $225 for full morocco
LATEST EDITION: The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (New York: Thomson, Gale, 2003), 15 vols., with 4 vols. of supplements
“The need of a Catholic Encyclopedia in English,” the editors of The Catholic Encyclopedia wrote, “was manifest for many years before it was decided to publish one. Editors of various general Encyclopedias had attempted to make them satisfactory from a Catholic point of view, but without success.”2 A London-based Catholic magazine, The Month, published a brutal review of the new Britannica in 1911, lashing out at its “anti-Catholic animus.” The reviewer worried that articles “on purely Catholic topics” were too often assigned to writers who were not Catholic; as a result, the entries on “Church History” were nothing but “a series of articles thoroughly Protestant and necessarily incorrect.” The Catholic Encyclopedia was conceived, written, and marketed as a response to this sort of “unscholarly bigotry.”3 The introduction promised “full and authoritative information on the entire cycle of Catholic interests, action and doctrine,”4 and that is what the team of editors and contributors delivered.
For t
he encyclopedia to be Catholic meant that it must exclude “facts and information which have no relation to the Church.” Catholics may need to know the length of the Nile and the atomic weight of sodium as much as anyone else, but these subjects did not make the cut because “there is no specifically Catholic science,” and “mathematics, physiology and other branches of human knowledge are neither Catholic, Jewish, nor Protestant.” Nor does the Encyclopedia include entries on prominent people who happen to be Catholic. Instead it is about Catholic saints, martyrs, doctrine, and liturgy. There is another respect, though, in which The Catholic Encyclopedia lived up to its name: it presumed to give authoritative answers to questions of faith. As the preface explained, “Designed to present its readers with the full body of Catholic teaching, the ENCYCLOPEDIA contains … precise statements of what the Church has defined.”5 Coverage of questions on which the Church itself had no definitive answers was balanced, but once a verdict was handed down from the Vatican, the matter was considered settled.
The planners resolved to embark on their encyclopedia at a meeting on December 8, 1904. They found models in a few comparable works, including the recent Jewish Encyclopedia (12 vols., 1901–6). On January 11, 1905, five editors—all Catholic educators with editorial experience—came together: Latin professor and CUNY librarian Charles G. Hebermann, Catholic University philosophy professor Edward A. Pace, Catholic World editor Condé B. Pallen, Catholic University professor of church history the Rt. Rev. Thomas J. Shahan, and Messenger editor John J. Wynne. The German-born Hebermann took the helm. The team gathered on Sixteenth Street in New York City, the offices of The Messenger, and over the next few years met a total of a hundred thirty-four times to plan the encyclopedia and monitor its progress.
They signed a contract on February 25, 1905, and issued a specimen of their planned encyclopedia containing the text of the preface and a few sample entries and illustrations.6 Printing was to be overseen by the Robert Appleton Company—even though there was no such company at the time. The publisher was incorporated in February 1905 specifically to print The Catholic Encyclopedia, and that was the only job it handled.
This project, unlike so many, moved at a brisk clip. The first volume, Aachen–Assize, appeared in March 1907, just two years after work began, and the final volumes of the main text, covering Simony–Tournely and Tournon–Zwirner, followed five years after that, right on time. A master index was added in 1914. It took less than a decade to get from the initial meeting to the last volume, a pace that puts many other reference editors to shame. As is only fitting for a work on Roman Catholic doctrine, The Catholic Encyclopedia received a thumbs-up from the Church: Remy Lafort issued the nihil obstat, permitting it to be printed, and Archbishop John Murphy Farley issued the imprimatur.
The Encyclopedia makes no pretense to treating most subjects even-handedly: this was an avowedly Catholic book. Look up a term like sola scriptura, the Protestant notion that reading the Bible unaided is enough for salvation, and the Catholic Encyclopedia will explain that “The belief in the Bible as the sole source of faith is unhistorical, illogical, fatal to the virtue of faith, and destructive of unity.” Look up Reformation in Britannica (1911) and you will read that it was “the religious and political revolution of the 16th century, of which the immediate result was the partial disruption of the Western Catholic Church and the establishment of various national and territorial churches.” For the Catholic Encyclopedia, though, it was “the religious movement which … while ostensibly aiming at an internal renewal of the Church, really led to a great revolt against it, and an abandonment of the principal Christian beliefs.” To be fair, Britannica was not always a model of impartiality. In Britannica, the entry for confession starts with an overview of the place of confession in Judaism, then says that “In the Gospels confession is scarcely mentioned.” A history of bitter controversy among early Christians follows, riddled with contradictions and scandals and petty rivalries. Britannica gives a condescending account of the origins of the Catholic sacrament, noting that “the constant repetition of confession and reconciliation, together with the fact that the most tender consciences would be the most anxious for the assurance of forgiveness, led to the practice being considered a normal part of the Christian life.” Contemporary Catholic practice is brushed off, suggesting that even the priests do not take the idea too seriously: “As confession is now administered in the Roman Church, the disciplinary penance is often little more than nominal, the recitation of a psalm or the like.” Thus it is not hard to see where the charge of “anti-Catholic bias” came from.
In The Catholic Encyclopedia, the reader is told that “Penance is a sacrament of the New Law instituted by Christ in which forgiveness of sins committed after baptism is granted through the priest’s absolution to those who with true sorrow confess their sins and promise to satisfy for the same.” In discussing the Inquisition, Britannica invokes the terms “reign of terror,” “burning at the stake,” “terrible measures of repression,” “massacre,” and “persecution”; the Catholic Encyclopedia explains that “Christian Europe was so endangered by heresy … that the Inquisition seemed to be a political necessity” and says that the many deaths were merely “the occasional executions of heretics [that] must be ascribed partly to the arbitrary action of individual rulers, … and in no wise to ecclesiastical law or the ecclesiastical authorities.”
Not all the entries are so parti pris, and most of the encyclopedia is learned and balanced. On subjects that did not prompt Protestant-Catholic quarrels—entries such as Kabbala and oratorio and dome and Septuagint—The Catholic Encyclopedia is a superb source for everyone. Many biographical entries—on popes, bishops, priests, even minor abbots and scholars—and historical entries are models of clarity and sometimes without rival even today, more than a century after they were written. Of course, on questions of Catholic doctrine and tradition—faith, rule of; Purgatory; natural law; extreme unction—there is no better place to turn for official policy. Even entries on subjects with which we might expect the Church to be uncomfortable—evolution, Galileo, Copernicus—are often balanced and frank.
Most Catholics were happy with the encyclopedia, but some critics emerged. The United States was not friendly to Roman Catholics in the 1910s. Only about 16 percent of Americans were Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant United States, and many of them were immigrants from what many considered “undesirable” countries—Ireland and Italy above all. In the 1920s, the recently refounded Ku Klux Klan had Roman Catholics high on their list of enemies. A legal struggle therefore ensued over whether the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state permitted public libraries to spend money on The Catholic Encyclopedia. Virtually no one had complained about public money buying works that reflected a Protestant worldview, but nativist bigotry viewed Roman Catholicism as a particular threat. The Encyclopedia triumphed in the lawsuits, and it remains a triumph as a monumental work of scholarship.
Not all doctrine is grounded in religious belief. Noah Webster’s dictionaries and spellers, for instance, were all about a different kind of doctrine, one grounded in American nationalism. Legal compilations such as the Code Napoléon (1804) were both reference sources and definitive statements, in this case of the emperor’s conception of the law. In 1839–40, Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud served up their own variety of doctrinal document in their three-volume Encyclopédie nouvelle, a party-line socialist account of the contemporary world.
One of the most engaging of the doctrinal reference books, though, came out of a nation-state that did not even exist when Webster, Napoleon, Leroux, and Reynaud were writing. On July 17, 1918, Czar Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, was executed. Not long afterward, in December 1922, the Russian Empire collapsed and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics took its place. A new nation had come into being.
Reference books abounded in czarist Russia. The Dictionary of the Russian Academy appeared in six parts in St. Petersburg from 1789 to
1794, with editions through the nineteenth century. Although German and French encyclopedias were popular in Russia, local versions could also be had. Late czarist Russia divided the encyclopedic field with two works bearing the same title: Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar, or “encyclopedic dictionary.” One, based on the German Konversations-Lexikon published by Brockhaus, came to be known as the Brockhaus-Efron; the other took the name of the two brothers who published it, Granat.
After the Russian Revolution, the works of the previous regime became deeply suspect. They reflected an old-fashioned conception of the world and had to be replaced. Since reference books often help to create a coherent national and cultural identity, the new USSR demanded a new set of reference works to cement its identity. More than that: the Russian Revolution was not only a political revolution but an intellectual one as well, operating on the premise that society ran on different principles than the world had assumed. New models of economics, history, linguistics, religion, even evolutionary biology were introduced. Dialectical materialism was the order of the day, and Marxism-Leninism was the lens through which the entire world was to be seen: the editors of the Soviet encyclopedias said as much in their prefaces.
Through the Soviet period, the Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Great Soviet Encyclopedia) was the most important work of general reference. The publication history is notoriously complicated. The first edition was begun in 1926, with four volumes appearing that year. The volumes came out serially, but not in alphabetical order. By the time it was finished, its sixty-five volumes, 65,000 articles, 12,000 illustrations, and 1,000 maps covered a tremendous range of subjects, virtually all of them seen through a Marxist-Leninist lens. The fifteen-page entry for encyclopedia, for example, features a prominent tribute to Diderot and d’Alembert, who are credited with sparking the French Revolution—explicitly identified as a precursor to the Russian Revolution.7
