All the Knowledge in the World
by Simon Garfield
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2022)
Scholarship of any era is still scholarship.
Page 8.
For someone whose entire working life has been based n the accumulation and elucidation of information, a good encyclopaedia will always be the historical backbone of broad knowledge.
Page 8.
I was fairly certain that relinquishing so much accumulated knowledge so dismissively was unlikely to signal good things.
Page 9.
That we don’t have the space in our homes (and increasingly our libraries) for a big set of books suggests a new set of priorities; depth yielding to the shallows. The process of making an encyclopaedia informs the worth we place on its contents, and to neglect this worth is to welcome a form of cultural amnesia.
Page 9.
An encyclopaedia is a publishing achievement like no other, and something worth celebrating in almost every manifestation.
Page 9.
Like an old atlas, old encyclopaedias tell us what we knew then. Not so long ago - just before we all got computers in fact - they did more than any other single thing to shape our understanding of the world.
Page 10.
Encyclopaedias were once as common as cars. Attracting both esteem and derision, they occupied the literature because they occupied the life.
Page 11.
I began to wonder what a set of unwanted encyclopaedias cheaper than firewood says about the value we place on information and its history, particularly at a time increasingly decried as rootless and unstable.
Page 14.
In English, the Britannica was the figurehead, the wartershed and the gold standard. It proved itself and improved itself over many editions, hundreds of printings and hundreds of thousands of articles. Its contributors were revered and its words were trusted, so much so that when Wikipedia launched in 2001, it plundered huge amounts of Britannica’s (out of copyright) eleventh edition as its core knowledge base.
Page 17.
By the 1750s, knowledge, or at least the accumulation of information, was seen as a marketable commodity, as saleable as cotton and tin.
Page 18.
One of the Britannica’s prime objectives: the accumulation in one publication of the key titles one might expect to find in a university library.
Page 20.
Encyclopaedia Britannica was an alternative university, the modern way with knowledge.
Page 23.
The encyclopaedia as we understand it today - a work of reference on a great variety of topics, a gathering of information and instructional articles intended as a summation of contemporary human knowledge - began life primarily as a definition of words.
Page 24.
Although the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had as many strange inclusions as it did odd omissions, it carried two clear messages for its purchasers: buy these volumes and become one of us; read these volumes and take your place in modern society.
Page 27.
Britannica was born of market demand, and the market demanded a continually updated version of the world.
Page 28.
The primitive alphabet was swiftly adopted by Middle-Eastern craftsmen and merchants, who found the symbols far easier to remember and record than the thousands of previous cuneiform or hieroglyphic symbols (it was perhaps the earliest example of a communication technology promoted by commerce).
Page 30.
It was only in the fifteenth century, with the advent of the printing press and the subsequent use of paper as a popular system of storage and trading records, that the alphabet came to be used regularly as a method of ordering and reference.
Page 31.
There was a tendency for entries appearing in Britannica late in the alphabet to be condensed in order to meet printing deadlines and financial constraints.
Page 35.
Today, the oldest writing we may recognise as encyclopaedic is from Pliny the Elder. Begun not long before the eruption of Vesuvius in 77, and completed by his son after its author perished in its aftermath, Pliny’s Naturalis Historia runs to thirty-seven books, from astronomy to zoology, purposely monumental.
Page 43.
We see how an encyclopaedia may reflect both the period in which it was written and the moral guidance of its compiler.
Page 46.
Our lack of culture records in this period suggest that because nothing survived therefore nothing existed.
Page 54.
What may pass for knowledge today would carry quite another definition a few hundred years ago. One can make a valid distinction between ‘raw’ information (something practical and specific), and ‘cooked’ knowledge, something that has been processed and analysed. Even this varies over tie: early medieval knowledge would certainly incorporate witchcraft, angels and demons.
Page 61.
One rarely read alone in the Middle Ages.
Page 63.
The Chinese had been making encyclopaedias - leishu - since the ‘Warring States’ era between 474 and 221 BCE; even then, the historian Harriet Zurnodorfer notes, there was ‘a dream of writing the world into a single text’.
Page 75.
What is a society without an archive of its history and the memory of its people? In some quarters, the destruction of physical evidence of a group’s culture is legally defined as genocide.
Page 77.
For much of the eighteenth century Shakespeare was regarded as an ignoramus. His plays were castigated for their lack of chronological, historical and geographical accuracy, and his lack of bookishness was used by the academic elite as an assault on creativity. The modern view has changed. Though lacking a donnish background, we know that Shakespeare had access to several almanacs and encyclopaedias.
Pages 77-78.
One recurring theme in his plays - man as a microcosm of the workings of the universe - reflects the grand ambitions of every compiler of the modern encyclopaedia: the world in a book.
Page 79.
Bacon lived at a time when our understanding of science and natural history was producing a revolution of the mind: the work of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler heralded a new type of precision thinking, and their number would soon be swelled by Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton. The encyclopaedia was about to turn from a mere storehouse of fats to a more contemplative whole, and it would provide the natural and facilitating companion to a complete transformation of how we viewed the world.
Page 82.
This was a common enough trait among early encyclopaedists: calling rivals out in the manner of professional wrestlers.
Page 87.
It was a particular feature of the Encyclopédie - and something that consistently distinguished it from its predecessors - that opinions were freely expressed as philosophical and moral truths. In this way, opinion replaced the superstition and myth of earlier encyclopaedias, and the promulgation of progressive ideas enabled its subscribers to feel they were part of a movement rather than just a readership.
Pages 112-113.
When the second edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica completed its publication in 1784, sixteen years after the first, it had greatly increased its scope and cost, and had grown from three volumes to ten.
Page 123.
To afford it all, a skilled London carpenter would have to save everything he earned (and go without food) for fifteen years.
Pages 123-124.
Its increase in size was due partly to the addition of biography, primarily of dead writers, artists and churchmen.
Page 124.
The pace of science and technology was accompanied by a thirst to absorb and interpret it.
Page 140.
The hunger for discovery was accompanied by the desire to contain, own and exploit.
The encyclopaedia was part of this control. History and maps enshrined ownership; the mighty book was a reader’s mighty estate. Inevitably and immediately, an encyclopaedia became a part of the society it aimed to reflect.
Page 140.
As long a Britain claimed an empire, the multi-volume encyclopaedia was colonialism in print. (Or, in an overworked term, knowledge was power.)
Page 141.
In 1750, the earth was widely considered to be only 6,000 years old; geologists added millions to it. When astronomers joined the party, and the number turned to billions, the challenge for the encyclopaedist was to explain not only earthbound philosophy but our place in the universe.
Page 141.
To accommodate all these new findings and acquisitions at the end of the eighteenth century, the study of storage and the concept of the archive became academic disciplines of their own, as did the art of knowledge-gathering and the categorisation of new finds. The encyclopaedia again mirrored these developments in both concept and design.
Page 141.
In Germany the word Brockhaus is to encyclopaedia what Roget is to thesaurus.
Page 144.
Knowledge confers majesty. The ownership of a large encyclopaedia may suggest grandeur in the manner of a drawing-room globe or a hand-drawn map of aristocratic lands. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, possession of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had become a soured of pride and privilege, of honour even. Such possession was often aspiration, an emblem of status.
Page 151.
Marketing men found it easier to sell the encyclopaedia as a tool, an assistant, rather than as omniscient tutor.
Page 155.
In the 1870s, Britannica was still published piecemeal. The first volume of the ninth edition appeared in 1875, and the last, the twenty-fourth, only in 1888.
Page 160.
This was another problem for Britannica: the transformation of knowledge into comprehension. Contributions from experts often failed to prove useful to a lay reader approaching the subject for the first time.
Pages 162-163.
From now on, the encyclopaedia would no longer be just for the wealthy or well educated. It was no longer aimed at the contributors’ peers. It was now to be sold to everyone with even a modest education who wanted to better understand the changes around them, and wished to improve the lives of their family. Comprehensive knowledge would become aspirational and affordable by instalments, and the market for encyclopaedias would move from the margins to the mainstream.
Page 167.
Encyclopaedias were synonymous with aspiration.
Page 168.
The eleventh edition, arguably the most varied and robust popular encyclopaedia ever made. It was so varied, indeed, and so enduring, that when Wikipedia opened for business ninety years later, it copied almost every word for its website, finding in it a solid base on which to build a digital revolution.
Page 169.
Its articles were far closer in tone to a genial discussion in a gentleman’s club than a stern address from a lectern.
Page 170.
The eleventh edition is still widely regarded as a pinnacle, both of the encyclopaedia industry and the publishing industry.
Page 170.
Even after the First World War, with so many uncertainties and dislocations, Britannica provided a leaning post, unstable as it was; in our minds, this was still the world we would defend in the next war, the twenty-nine volumes as good a domestic shelter as anything else.
Page 171.
The eleventh edition was to be the last of its kind, the last to be so sure of itself the last before the war. Many of its contributors died between 1914 and 1918, and with them died the superiority, the callousness and the downright brilliant know-it-all assertiveness of Britannica’s imperial tone.
Page 183.
More than any other publication, the storage of encyclopaedias has always been an issue. But storage can also be an affectation, and from the time in 1860 when the eighth edition offered a £3 revolving mahogany bookcase to house its twenty-one volumes, spinning furniture became as much a status symbol as the books it was holding.
Page 189.
By 1930, the bookcases had become a dominant feature in the advertisements.
Page 189.
The widening of the encyclopaedia’s appeal was driven by an equally expansive quest for an increase in sales. And something else too: an overdue attempt to improve the eruption of the encyclopaedia in the popular imagination.
Page 196.
One could build a fair case suggesting that a junior encyclopaedia would always be more influential than an adult one, given the impressionable age of its readers.
Page 225.
The encyclopaedia, composed t the height of empire, was also committed to a proudly British way of life.
Page 227.
An encyclopaedia, unlike a dictionary, ‘deals only with words and subjects about which there is something interesting to be said’.
Page 233.
Once marketed exclusively to mature adults (‘No professional home should be regarded as complete without one … its articles are not mere outline sketches, always so unsatisfactory to the information seeker’) the focus moved in the late 1950s to younger parents and their children. The obligation of educating one’s offspring - and the guilt that would descend if you didn’t - had always been a part of the marketing kit, but now this approach moved centre stage.
Page 251.
These multi-volume publications are necessarily conceived as a physical compression of definitive knowledge. Far from the historical equivalent of the rant on social media, they are instead the tablets from the mountains.
Page 263.
Encyclopaedias are a mirror of contemporary knowledge, a spotlight on current learning, and we may legitimately question what sort of opinions we have formed from our consultations with apparently irrefutable text at an impressionable age.
Page 264.
To have the world explained between single covers, without multi-volume cross-referencing, was a God-like achievement.
Page 269.
There is something quietly absurd about the very notion of the pocket encyclopaedia, as if the world itself was suddenly considered more containable than before.
Page 269.
The mid-1990s marked a long slow funeral for the print encyclopaedias … . The CD-ROM was taking over, and not long after that most people would have some sort of dial-up online service provider.
Page 288.
Tradition - even one stretching back to the eighteenth century - would be afforded little respect as it crashed head-on into a digital future.
Page 292.
In 1990, the last year it saw a profit, Britannica made $40 million on a sales revenue of $650 million. That year it sold 117,000 printed sets, but by the time revenue dropped to $453 million in 1994 it was selling only 51,000, and a large proportion of its sales force (2000-plus in 1990) was being laid off.
Page 299.
In theory, Wikipedia should be a disaster. The work of world experts and world amateurs, creators and vandals, anarchists and trainspotters, super-grammarians and super-creeps, many hundreds of thousands of each from all the world’s nations, every one vaguely suspicious of everyone else, some using Google Translate in hilarious ways, all battling for some sort of supremacy in a multiverse of ultimate truth - that doesn’t bode well. And yet that’s what Wikipedia is - an errant community of career-long academics and lone-wolf information crackpots that continues to create something of brilliance with almost every keystroke.
Page 306.
It has indeed completely changed how templates work. It strives for democracy in its performance and neutrality in its effect. It is ad-free, pop-up free, cookie-free and free. It confounds human venality and appeals to our better nature.
Page 309.
It certainly confounds its co-founder Jimmy Wales. Wales set up Wikipedia to supplement an earlier online open-source encyclopaedia he had founded with Larry Sanger the year before, named Nupedia. The problem with Nupedia was its concept: its articles were written by experts and peer-reviewed, which rendered it much too slow for mass appeal in the digital world. Wiki means ‘quick’ in Hawaiian, and Wikipedia joined the growing number of online communal wikis already available that could be compiled and edited swiftly by anyone with a basic knowledge of digital etiquette. Everyone who contributed to Wikipedia was a volunteer, and from the start the site was governed by its contributors.
Page 309.
Very early on, Wikipedia decided that it would not publish original unsourced material on its site, relying instead on information published elsewhere.
Page 312.
Often, the closer one is connected to the truth of a topic, the harder it can be. One is not allowed to edit anything with which one may have a personal connection (and therefor insider knowledge). One cannot edit one’s own biography, for instance, or ask anyone associate with you to do it.
Page 313.
Wikipedia has an obvious and magnificent advantage over the print stores it supplanted: incredible speed.
Page 326.
In 2011, a survey into what motivates its users to contribute, found that they key reasons were: people enjoyed giving their time to share and improve available information; they believed information should be freely available; they enjoyed sharing their areas o expertise; it was fun; they appreciated Wikipedia’s policy of openness; they enjoyed finding and correcting mistakes - it was a quest, a challenge and a puzzle.
Page 332.
Open access lays bare a wide and varied community.
Page 339.
‘Encyclopaedias belong to a time when knowledge was owned by a handful of established authorities, who decided not only what was true but what deserved to be ennobled by its inclusion. Their feel of leather-bound permanence encouraged us to forget the dynamic nature of scientific knowledge.’
Page 347.
The very structure of the traditional encyclopaedia dooms itself. It can never know it all or show enough of what it knows. It can’t hope to keep up with important developments in the world, nor take back what it said about Hitler or slavery. And it can never answer the most searching questions about its own existence: are the people who read it from A-Z better able to understand the world than those who only read the preface? … Is the information we receive today more or less reliable than the information we received in our childhood?
Page 357.
The hope of the ancients to capture everything between covers now seems as futile as counting the number of stars in the universe.
Page 357.
We confront one arresting paradox: we know more about our lack of knowledge today than at any previous time in history.
Page 358.
Known Unknowns: All the things you know you don’t’ know
Unknown Unknowns: All the things you don’t know you don’t know
Errors: All the things you think you know but don’t
Unknown Knowns: All the things you don’t know you know
Taboos: Dangerous, polluting or forbidden knowledge
Denials: All the things too painful to know, so you don’t
Page 359.
Every generation believes its world to be changing faster than the last, and with a greater clarity of purpose, but we make a mistake if we think it necessarily contains more valuable knowledge.
Page 361.
These old volumes show us what we thought we knew, and we discard them with a rash disregard for the work of our forebears. Ancient editions carry a secret knowledge of their own, the enshrined accretion of learning. If nothing else, they are materially wonderful objects.
Page 361.
I’m saddened that the world no long has a use for most of them, and that this remarkable corner of history is history itself.
Page 372.