Rule, Britannica

One of education's better ironies is that the broad, stately river of classified knowledge named Encyclopaedia Britannica began 190 years ago in a clear, sparkling rill of Scotch whisky. The tale of the encyclopedia's turbulent course from the Edinburgh workshop of hard-drinking Editor William Smellie to its present serene residence at the University of Chicago is told in The Great EB (University of Chicago Press; 339 pp.; $4.95) by Herman Kogan, drama critic and books editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.

In 1768 Europe's Enlightenment was in full vigor; Denis Diderot's French Encyclopedic had just come out, and Britain was ripe for an up-to-date compendium of all knowledge. The Britannica's founders were Colin Macfarquhar, a small-business man of Edinburgh, and Andrew Bell, an engraver of dog collars, who stood 4 1/2 ft. tall, and had a nose so embarrassingly big that he used to mock his mockers with an even larger one of papier-mache. Smellie, their 28-year-old choice for editor, spieled long Latin poems when drunk, and was celebrated as "a veteran in wit, genius and bawdry."

By December 1768 the first two sections of the encyclopedia were ready, as pamphlets (cost: sixpence each on plain paper, eightpence for a fancy edition); with the income from them and backing obtained ahead of time from subscribers, succeeding sections and finally the first bound volume were published.

Whiskyfied Scholars. Two years later Smellie had written, or pasted together from such sources as Hume, Locke, Voltaire and Francis Bacon, the remaining two volumes. The 2,659-page set contained a long description of Noah's ark and a terse write-off of "Woman": "The female of man. See HOMO." It advised that tobacco could desiccate the brain to "a little black lump consisting of mere membranes." It was salted with 160 excellent engravings by Bell, including a handsome map of North America.

The Britannica sold more than 3,000 sets at -L-12 apiece, enough for Bell and Macfarquhar to plan a second edition. By 1777, when work started, Smellie had gone off (later to become a boozing buddy of Robert Burns), and the publishers replaced him with James Tytler, a scholar just as whiskyfied and twice as eccentric, being given to balloon ascensions. Editor Tytler stayed on the ground long enough to get out a ten-volume, 8,595-page encyclopedia by 1784.

Rather than retail quaint isolated facts, the encyclopedia's first edition had pioneered with complete and orderly treatises, e.g., an explicitly illustrated article on midwifery. The second introduced another innovation, biographies of famous living persons. But there were gaps, notably on the subject of the new United States of America. Although the Salem witch trials were discussed, the American Revolution was not; Boston was mentioned, but there were no articles on New York or Philadelphia. An enterprising American publishing pirate named Thomas Dobson corrected these slights when the third edition began to come out in 1787. Rewriting sections offensive to the U.S., and omitting the word "Britannica" as well as the dedication to George III, he hijacked and printed Encyclopaedia articles as fast as Bell and Macfarquhar could put them out. Plagiarism plagued the Britannica until passage by Congress of the international copyright law in 1891.

"Damnable Hubbub." Prestige of the Britannica grew with succeeding editions, and the editors easily enlisted the world's famous men as writers. Sir Walter Scott wrote on drama. Harvard President Edward Everett, the first American contributor, wrote a biography of Washington. Lord Rayleigh, the physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1904, was commissioned to write on "Light." He missed his deadline, but the encyclopedia was being published volume by volume in alphabetical order, and his piece was rescheduled under "Optics"--and again as "Undulating Theory of Light." It finally got in under "Wave Theory of Light."

Most famous Britannica edition was the ninth, completed in 1889, with 25 volumes and 20,504 pages (v. the current Britannica's 24 volumes, 27,247 pages). Contributors included Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, Darwinian Thomas Henry Huxley, and Revolutionary Russian Prince Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, who wrote his article on "Anarchism" while locked up in a French prison.

In 1897 Horace Hooper, a U.S. book salesman, appeared in Britain, began dealings that led to his buying the Britannica (in 1901). In 1898, he teamed with the Times of London in a hard-sell campaign to hawk the encyclopedia at cut rates with time payments and advertising. A howl arose over the raucous black-type hucksterism in the grey pages of the "Thunderer." Wrote one affronted M.P. to Hooper: "You have made a damnable hubbub, sir, and an assault upon my privacy with your American tactics." But in a few years, Hooper's whooping sold 100,000 sets of the Britannica, and earned the Times $540,000.

The Best There Is. A breach with the Times led the Britannica to sponsorship, for a short period, by Cambridge University. Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald took it to Chicago in 1920 when it was purchased by his firm, Sears, Roebuck & Co. In 1943 Sears turned over the Britannica to the University of Chicago, with William Benton, sometime adman (Benton & Bowles) and U.S. Senator, putting up $100,000 as working capital.

Buying cheap (2-c- a word for articles) and selling dear ($298 to $1,500 a set), the Britannica has since earned the university some $5,500,000. Its contributors include 43 Nobel Prizewinners. Editor-in-Chief Walter Yust and a staff of 150 keep a continuous watch on the timeliness of its 43,512 articles. Editor Yust, onetime Philadelphia literary critic, defends the Britannica against an array of complaints, including pro-British bias (although the encyclopedia has been U.S.-owned for half a century) and Americanization. A more serious objection sometimes heard: that the work is too scholarly for laymen, too elementary for scholars. But despite criticism, the encyclopedia's swarm of salesmen boast, with much justification: "When you buy the Britannica, you are getting the best there is"--all 38,258,426 words of it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.