Other encyclopedia companies quickly followed suit, and the door-to-door encyclopedia salesman became extinct. bcdan07. Peter Mark Roget, compiler of the famous Roget's Thesaurus and a former secretary of the Royal Society, contributed the entry for physiology. In 1928, Rosenwald bought back the rights to the Britannica, leaving Cox as publisher. Britannica promotes blind trust. Sixty pages of new information were added onto the end of "America," which grew to 138 pages, with an index and new maps. It was either a door-to-door salesman or a hawker at the county fair who suckered my parents into buying the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, the Encyclopaedia Britannica will only be available in digital versions. It is the latest move Encyclopaedia Britannica has made to expand its Internet reference services and move farther into educational products. The Britannica explicitly positioned itself as a conservative publication in reaction to the radical French Encyclopdie of Diderot published between 1751 and 1766. Encyclopaedia Britannica cost $1400 for a full 32-volume print edition. From now on, no more impressionable parents will be guilted into spending enormous sumsthe set now goes for $1,400to help their kids do better in school. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). A 204-page appendix, written in 1784, is found at the end of Vol. The lack of an index and the unusual organization into two sets of alphabetically organized articles provoked much criticism. The index was 187 pages, and was either bound alone as an unnumbered thin volume, or was bound together with volume I. Already a subscriber? When Dr. Traill fell ill, he was assisted by a young Scottish philosopher, John Downes. Now, the Encyclopaedia Britannica will only be available in digital versions. By 1926, the eleventh edition was beginning to show its age, and work on a new edition was begun. Although this was not much of an increase over the 10th edition (which named 37 female contributors out of 1800 total), it was heralded publicly as a major advance in recognizing the contributions of women in learned circles. The copyright of the material in the supplement to the 3rd edition was held by Thomas Bonar, who asked 20,000pounds sterling for it, which Bell declined. The flagship, 32-volume printed edition, available every two years, was sold for $1400. Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, 1991, under the word geology. A total of 45,000 authorized sets were produced this way for the US market. For example, the "Boston" article in the 3rd edition contains the sentence, "The following is a description of this capital before the commencement of the present American war." Children's encyclopedias offer more basic information than the adult versions and more pictures. Good riddance! The articles were therefore divided into 30 classifications and a schedule for their revision worked out, such that every article would be checked at least twice a decade. [citation needed] Hooper formed a partnership with Clarke, his brother George Clarke, and Walter Montgomery Jackson to sell the Britannica under the sponsorship of The Times, meaning that The Times would advertise the sale and lend its respectable name. #1 Can anyone tell me how much a set of World Book Encyclopedias cost in the early 1970's? At this time complete sets of the encyclopedia were priced between $1,500 and $2,200, and the product was considered part of a luxury brand with an impeccable reputation handed down from generation to generation. The article "America" reprinted the entire 81 pages of the 3rd edition, but appended 52 new pages after it, and an index for the 133-page article. There were entries on cities, countries, and rivers and other geographical subjects, but there were no biographies. After "Science" is a new 24-page article "Amusements In Science", which is a virtual Mr. Wizard for the opening of the 19th century. How much did Encyclopedia Britannica cost in 1970? Compared to the 8th edition, the 9th was far more luxurious, with thick boards and high-quality leather bindings, premier paper, and a production which took full advantage of the technological advances in printing in the years between the 1850s and 1870s. "Entomology" was expanded from 8 pages and one plate in the 3rd edition to 98 pages and 4 plates in the 4th, with a 3-page index. And we can prove it.. Ephraim Chambers wrote a very popular two-volume Cyclopedia in 1728, which went through multiple editions and awakened publishers to the enormous profit potential of encyclopedias. The Encyclopdia Britannica was first published in 1768, when it began to appear in Edinburgh, Scotland. The landmark ninth edition, often called "the Scholar's Edition",[5] was published from January 1875 to 1889 in 25 volumes, with volume 25 the index volume. In this situation the patient suffered to remain till he began to shiver or felt himself uneasyThe patient was then taken out, and, after being wrapped in a linen cloth, was placed upon a mattress, and two hours afterwards his whole body was rubbed with the ointment composed of the leaves of the solanum nigrum and hog's lard. Availability: Pre-order. In 1996, the Intel Corporation's Pentium Pro PC was able to execute 400,000,000 additions per second. When finished in 1784, complete sets were sold at Charles Elliot's book shop in Edinburgh for 10 pounds, unbound. "[29] The American partnership sold over 20,000 copies of the Britannica in the United States (four runs of 5000), after which Hooper and Jackson bought out the two Clarke brothers in early 1900. The preface to the third edition regards Macfarquhar as the editor of the first and second editions as well as of the first half of the third edition, but the preface to the Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions says that Smellie edited the first. Presumably, this recent increase reflects the introduction of efficient electronic indexing, since the size of the encyclopedia has remained nearly constant at approximately 40 million words from 1954 to the present and far less than 40% of the encyclopedia has changed from 1985 to 2007. ontracts on support for life and contracts on support until death are two very similar contracts that are concluded between a provider of support and a recipient of support. The index was called "Table of the Articles and Treatises Contained in This Work" and was 9 pages long. mrmima. It was very different from the 11th edition, having fewer volumes and simpler articles, continuing the business strategy of popularizing the Britannica for the American mass market at the expense of its scholarship. The 15th edition was produced over ten years at a cost of $32 million and released in 1974 in 30 volumes. Volume 1 was only 5 parts, entirely made up of dissertations. Other people alleged to have copied the 9th edition included John Wanamaker and the Reverend Isaac Kaufmann Funk of the Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia. For example, "Chemistry" goes into great detail on an obsolete system of what would now be called alchemy, in which earth, air, water and fire are named elements containing various amounts of phlogiston. A sixth dissertation, by J.D. Pearle. The 7th edition, when complete, went on sale for 24 per set. The supplement to the 4th/5th/6th edition addressed the issue of updates in a clumsy way, often referring back to the encyclopedia, essentially making the reader look everything up twice. so irrelevant, but so arresting! The 6th edition was a reprint of the 5th with a modern typeface. It was nothing to be compared to a typical encyclopedia index, such as the ones found at the end of the seventh and further editions of Britannica. Tytler also describes the architecture of Noah's Ark in detail (illustrated with a copperplate engraving). Tytler wrote many science and history articles and almost all of the minor articles; by Robert Burns' estimate, Tytler wrote over three-quarters of the second edition. It also was sold as a unit for owners of the 4th edition, and became known as "Supplement to the 4th, 5th and 6th edition. Despite the policy of continuous revision, the 14th edition of the Britannica gradually became outdated. [45] Most readers could not predict whether a given subject would be found in Micropdia or the Macropdia; the criteria by which the articles were sorted were not obvious even to scholars,[43] despite Dr. Adler's claims that the sorting followed naturally from the Propdia's outline of all knowledge. Sales of both of these were disappointing competition with Wikipedia is mentioned. This edition was also enormously profitable, yielding 42,000pounds sterling profit on the sale of roughly 10,000 copies. "Geology" is new, even though the word had been coined in 1735. Again under the sponsorship of The Times of London, and with Adam & Charles Black in the UK, the new owners quickly produced an 11-volume supplement to the 9th edition; being 9 volumes of text, 2533, a map volume, 34, which was 1 inch taller than the other volumes, and a new index, vol 35, also an inch taller than 2533, which covered the first 33 volumes (the maps volume 34 had its own index). But hardly anybody pays even that: the vast majority of copies are given away to promote the sale of computers and peripherals. This might sound unconventional, but I'd go with blue-chip art. Not bad when you consider the 2008. My advice is to make the wiser, cheaper choice, one that will prove more helpful to your kids in the long run: Pay nothing to Britannica and teach your young ones to use Google and Wikipedia. The fifth edition was a corrected reprint of the fourth; there is virtually no change in the text. Inserted after the preface in the first volume was a two-page list of the publications used in compiling the work. It consisted of 21 numbered volumes with 17,101 pages and 506 plates. The scope of the second edition was enlarged by the inclusion of biographical articles, by the expansion of geographical articles to become history articles, and in general by the insertion of Various Detached Parts of Knowledge (as the title page put it). [17] Accordingly, the 3rd edition's 30-page entry "Earth," as well as its 24-page article "Earthquake," and the geological sections of its article "Natural History", were dropped, as these topics are found in the 4th edition's newly written article, which is 78 pages long and has its own index. The owner of Sears, philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, was friends with Horace Hooper and enthusiastic about the Britannica's promise; he single-handedly saved the Britannica from bankruptcy several times over the next fifteen years. and a somewhat melancholy article on "Love" that persisted in the Britannica for nearly a century (until its 9th edition): As the force of love prevails, sighs grow deeper; a tremor affects the heart and pulse; the countenance is alternately pale and red; the voice is suppressed in the sauces; the eyes grow dim; cold sweats break out; sleep absents itself, at least until the morning; the secretions become disturbed; and a loss of appetite, a hectic fever, melancholy, or perhaps madness, if not death, constitutes the sad catastrophe. the 1951 Encyclopedia Britannica world atlas is worth about $125 australian dollars to the right buyer, so be wise! By mid-1971 unemployment reached a 10-year peak of 6 percent, and inflation continued. The second edition was published in 181 numbers from 21 June 1777 to 18 September 1784; these numbers were bound into ten volumes dated 17781783, having 8,595 pages and 340 plates again engraved by Andrew Bell. the copyrighted articles are listed at the front of each volume of the Scribner's sets, The Publishers' Weekly No. [26] In a typical contemporary assessment, "It is called the Micropdia, for 'little knowledge,' and little knowledge is what it provides. If you pay for this service, youre building a cocoon of truth around students wholl one day enter a world where everyone claims to be an expertand where a lot of those people are lying. Fascinated by the idea of owning a cross section of the trunk of the tree of knowledge just prior to the . 1688, June 4, 1904, There are many places the encyclopedia can be accessed online (see the, as stated by J.L. Edited by Hugh Chisholm in London and by Franklin Henry Hooper in New York, the 11th edition was the first to be published substantially at one time, instead of volume by volume. Written by international experts and scholars, the articles in this collection reflect the standards that have been the hallmark of the leading English-language encyclopedia for over 240 years. [39] Powell also introduced the Library Research Service (1936), in which owners of the Britannica could write to have their personal questions researched and answered by the editorial staff. Thus, the 9th and 11th editions had 17,000 and 40,000 articles, respectively, although they were roughly equivalent in size. The final edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has almost sold out after nostalgic readers rushed to acquire their own copies of the 32-volume set, which will be the last ever printed.. A two-volume supplement to the third edition was published in 1801, having 1,624 pages and 50 copperplates by D. Lizars. Black was able to hold costs to roughly 75,655. It contained 30 volumes and 18,251 pages, with 8,500 photographs, maps, flags, and illustrations in smaller "compact" volumes. Volume 2, in 6 parts, was the beginning of alphabetical listings. There's one set on Abebooks ( World Book Encyclopedia) for $485. And a 22-volume set of the 2004 World Books could be snatched up for $189.99. [31], Taken together, the 35 volumes were dubbed the "10th edition". [3] The Britannica was published under the pseudonym "A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland", possibly referring to the many gentlemen who had bought subscriptions. He later said:[4]. 19802023 The Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor has expired. The alphabetical encyclopedia began at the beginning of volume 2. But I know how to checkI can look at the biography it suggests, and I can check many of the rest of its assertions through its hundreds of footnotes. The majority of copy in the 4th edition, however, is unchanged from the 3rd. At the same time, the number of Micropdia volumes was increased from 10 to the present 12 volumes, although the number of articles was reduced from 102,214 to roughly 65,000. Appear in Edinburgh for 10 pounds, unbound work on a new was... They were roughly equivalent in size 18,251 pages, with 8,500 photographs, maps, flags, and illustrations smaller. Articles and Treatises Contained in this work '' and was either bound alone as an unnumbered thin,! A hawker at the county fair who suckered my parents into buying encyclopedia. Available every two years, was sold for $ 189.99 went on sale for 24 per set costs to 75,655. A young Scottish philosopher, John Downes appear in Edinburgh for 10 pounds, unbound yielding! Printed edition, when complete, went on sale for 24 per set has made to expand its Internet services... 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