There can be no clearer evidence of the swift and steep decline of the printed reference book than these figures taken from a recent New York Times: In 1990, the Encyclopaedia Britannica sold 120,000 sets (each set comprising 32 volumes) in the US. That turned out to be its peak year. Since its last revision in 2010, it has sold only 8,000 sets in the same market. Another 4,000 sets lie in a warehouse. When the last of those goes, the paper-and-ink Britannica will be no more. Recently its publisher announced that future editions will appear exclusively online, bringing to a close a printing history that began in Edinburgh in 1768.
The news prompted some retrospection and analysis about what the Britannica had stood for not so much the meaning of what was inside it as what owning it signified. Aspiration was particularly remembered. Many people who bought Britannica imagined that books containing "the sum of human knowledge" opened the way to a prosperous enlightenment.
We were never a Britannica family. The salesman went away with no forms signed, leaving us to get by with what we already had: a mid-Victorian edition of Chambers Encyclopaedia, Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia, Pears Cyclopaedia, the Vimto Book of Knowledge. All had their drawbacks. The dozen volumes of Chambers had been acquired second-hand before the war and looked splendid in their gilt-lettered spines and marbled endpapers, but the source of the Nile was only one of many discoveries that came too late to be found in their pages. And while the Children's Encyclopaedia undeniably belonged to the 20th century, and had pictures of biplanes to prove it, its sentimentality and capricious arrangement not so much A to Z as M to C via Y made it a poor source of information. Pears had a nice frontispiece, Bubbles by Millais, and was good as far as it went (one volume, so not very far). All I can remember about the Vimto book was that it was really just a pamphlet of odd facts and figures, and had a detailed engraving of the Vimto factory, smoking away busily somewhere in Lancashire.
Self-improving ambition
The Britannica would have been a vast improvement, but expense ruled it out. And so we contrived to look down on it for behaving treasonably and becoming "too American" in ways my father never specified, or for its role as an ornament in houses where, we were sure, nobody ever bothered to disturb its military uprightness on bookshelves that contained no other books. Then one day my father's closest friend came to visit and announced he was about to buy the Britannica, just like that, and not because he wanted his family to do better than he had; he and his wife had no children or because he imagined the books would enhance his social status.
My father's friend, Sandy Paterson, needs a little description, because almost nobody like him is still alive. Like my father, he left school at 14, served a factory apprenticeship and found work as a fitter. They had a mutual enthusiasm for cycling, which was how they met in a small Scottish border town in the 1920s. He and his wife, who'd been crippled with arthritis as a young woman, lived in a small West Lothian village. We would visit as a family by taking a ferry and then the bus, and then climbing the stairs to their flat above the village shop. There was no electricity; not even gas.
When it got dark, Sandy would pump up the Tilley lamp, which then hissed in the background all evening as the adults' conversation moved from the personal and present to the general and historic, from (say) the alleged misrule of the local landlord, the Marquess of Linlithgow, via Kant to the reign of the pharaohs.
When Sandy consulted the Encyclopaedia Britannica and read aloud a passage from one of its entries, the decoration on the binding would glisten in the light of the Tilley lamp. How much of it he managed to read eventually I have no idea, but he wasn't a man to give up lightly on a self-improving ambition.
Information "the sum of human knowledge" had a different shape then, and for 40 years after. Rather than an invisible omnipresence that can be tapped into wherever a laptop or a phone can find a signal, it lived like miser's gold in hard, little piles that were distributed unevenly throughout the country.
The Britannica gave Sandy one such pile. To find another in his vicinity might have been difficult. You might have needed to take the bus all the way into Edinburgh, where the piles turned into towers in libraries, bookshops and museums. To the city, in fact, where 244 years ago a baker's son and a wigmaker's son got together to publish the first instalment of the work they called an encyclopaedia, printing summaries of knowledge alphabetically in the belief that people liked to find out.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
