#32: Paper encyclopaedia

Do people still buy paper encyclopaedias? According to a feature in my local paper interviewing local second-hand booksellers, they are very hard to shift (although I can’t find wider sales figures). And are companies still publishing them? Apparently not – the last 32-volume printed Encyclopaedia Britannica (with new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project) appeared in 2010 and it is now online only. It appears Wikipedia and the web have put paid to them.

But I found myself reaching for this bulky object recently when I wasn’t feeling in the best of spirits and was staying at a friend’s house. There was something peculiarly comforting about learning, or relearning, the names of the muscles and bones in the human body, the speeds of trains planes and automobiles, the properties of different plants, the development of cinema. 

In his poem ‘Ode to an Encyclopaedia’ James Arthur praises ‘the Questing Beast of blue and gold’ thus:

my narrative without an ending, you had a diagram of a cow
broken down into the major cuts of beef, and an image
of the Trevi Fountain.

This sense of comfort and relaxation would not be quite the same on the web and I’m not sure why – perhaps the attractive feeling of a stable canon of knowledge rather than an ever-changing hive mind, or even that encyclopaedias are still thought of as partly for children (although apparently the word comes via the Greek for ‘well-rounded education’).

Anyway, here is a short quiz based on things I learnt from this (admittedly 1995) encyclopaedia. Scroll down for answers.

1. Which country has the densest population?

2. Which planet has the longest seasons?

3. Which fish swims the fastest?

1. Bangladesh 2. Uranus (each pole gets 42 years of light, then 42 years of darkness) 3. Tuna

PS for an interesting analysis of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s early battles with Microsoft’s CD encyclopaedia Encarta, see this article by Shane Greenstein of Harvard Business School.