Editing and publishing

The length of encyclopaedias and encyclopaedic articles

There always have been and there still are a number of successful one-volume
encyclopaedias. Outstanding examples of the 20th century include The Columbia
Encyclopedia, the Petit Larousse, Hutchinson’s New Twentieth Century Encyclopedia,
and the Random House Encyclopedia. In the Random House set the contents were
divided into two sections, a Colorpedia, composed of relatively lengthy articles dealing
with broad topics, and an Alphapedia, composed of concise entries on very specific
subjects. Some booksellers and publishers confirm that there is, however unreasonably,
a certain amount of public prejudice against the single-volume form and that most
people prefer a multivolume work. Throughout the entire history of encyclopaedias
there has been much variation in the number of volumes. Many of the Chinese
encyclopaedias have been considerably larger than any Western work. Pliny’s Historia
naturalis comprised about 2,500 chapters, Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon was planned for
12 volumes and eventually filled 64; the publishers of the Encyclopédie were faced with
a lawsuit (1768–78) for producing a 26-volume encyclopaedia instead of the 10 volumes
they had promised; Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber’s
German Allgemeine Encyclopädie (“General Encyclopaedia”) had already reached 167
volumes at the time of its discontinuance; and the major Soviet encyclopaedia consisted
of more than 50 volumes. Today most print encyclopaedias range between 20 and 30
volumes, occupying between three and four feet (about a metre) of shelf space. Thus, the
modern encyclopaedia appears smaller than its 19th-century counterpart, but, in fact,
the content may be greater because the thick mat paper of Victorian times has been
replaced by a thinner paper capable of reproducing colour and black-and-white halftone
illustrations with sharp definition.

Even more noticeable than variations in the number of volumes in encyclopaedias has
been an even greater variation in the average lengths of articles within those volumes.
The 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica contained almost twice as many
articles as the last significant edition before it, but it contained only 15 or 16 percent
more words. The difference had to do with editorial considerations regarding the matter
of fragmentation. Although most of the major encyclopaedias of the past had devoted
considerable space to any topic of major importance, there was increasing recognition in
the 19th century that an alternative method of treatment would be to break large
subjects into their constituent subtopics for alphabetical distribution throughout the set.
Those who favoured this more fragmented approach argued that by focusing on the
smaller part of the whole, the editors could facilitate the user’s search for specific
information and that the liberal provision of cross-references would facilitate a
recombination of the fragments by those interested in the bigger picture. Against this
practice, it was argued that most cross-references are not followed up by most readers,
that the shorter fragmented pieces work against a correct understanding of the larger
subject, and that fragmentation inevitably involved a great amount of repetition of basic
information throughout all the related articles.

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Nevertheless, Brockhaus, Meyer, Larousse, and other encyclopaedias of the shorter-
entry type have had and continue to have a strong following.

Authorship

The first encyclopaedia makers had no doubts concerning their ability to compile their
works single-handedly. Cassiodorus, Honorius Inclusus (or Solitarius), and Vincent of
Beauvais fully justified this attitude, though their task was largely that of the
anthologist. Vincent and many other encyclopaedists employed both scribes and
scholars to help them in their work, but, once the encyclopaedia reached the stage of
independent writing, it was clear that the editorial task was going to become more
complex. Even so, some of the later pocket encyclopaedias—such as the English
bookseller John Dunton’s mediocre Ladies’ Dictionary (1694), An Universal History of
Arts and Sciences (1745) by the French-born Englishman Chevalier Denis de Coëtlogon,
and the popular Allgemeines Lexicon (1721; “General Lexicon”) by the Prussian scholar
Johann Theodor Jablonski—were substantially or almost wholly the work of a single
author; such items are, however, negligible.

John Harris, an English theologian and scientist, may have been one of the first to enlist
the aid of experts, such as the naturalist John Ray and Sir Isaac Newton, in compiling
his Lexicon Technicum (1704; “Technical Lexicon”). Johann Heinrich Zedler, in
his Universal-Lexicon (1732–50), went further by enlisting the help of two general
editors, supported by nine specialist editors, the result being a gigantic work of great
accuracy. The French Encyclopédie, the largest encyclopaedia issued at that time,
inevitably had many contributors, although the French writer Voltaire said that
Diderot’s collaborator, the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt (aided by secretaries),
contributed about three-quarters of the articles in that work. The pattern for future
encyclopaedias was established: for any substantial work, it would be necessary not only
to have contributions from the experts of the day, but it would also be essential to have
subject editors who could supervise the coverage and content in each area of knowledge.

Encyclopaedia adjuncts

The readers of modern encyclopaedias are rarely aware of the numerous aids that have
been provided to make their search for information so easy and efficient. Only when
recourse is had to one of the older encyclopaedias does the reader become conscious of
the advances that have been made. In former days it was often difficult to distinguish
between one article and the next, because distinctive headings or inset titles or the use
of boldface was rare. Nor was the necessity for running titles or alphabetical notations at
the head of the pages fully appreciated. Even more troublesome was the problem of the
arrangement of entries for several persons of the same name; reference to the older
encyclopaedias under such headings as “Henry,” “John,” or “Louis”—names held by
both princes and religious potentates—will show how little the art of acceptable
arrangement was understood.

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Cross-references and bibliographies

Cross-references are an essential feature of the modern encyclopaedia; they date back at
least as far as Bandini’s Fons memorabilium universi, but it was Brockhaus who
introduced an ingenious system of using arrows instead of the words see also. The
Columbia Encyclopedia achieved the same effect by printing in small capital letters the
words under which additional information could be found. Some encyclopaedias devote
each volume to one letter of the alphabet or indicate the division between letters by
thumb-indexing. In electronic encyclopaedias, cross-references are hyperlinked and
provide virtually instantaneous movement throughout the database. In established
encyclopaedias the bibliographies for individual articles are usually the result of careful
editorial consultation with the writer and with librarians.

Indexes

Undoubtedly the major adjunct of the modern encyclopaedia is its index. As early as
1614 the bishop of Petina, Antonio Zara, included a type of index in his Anatomia
ingeniorum et scientiarum (“Anatomy of Talents and Sciences”). A Greek professor
at Basel, Johann Jacob Hoffman, added an index to his Lexicon universale of 1677;
the Encyclopédie was completed by a two-volume “Table analytique et raisonnée” for
the entire 33 volumes of text, supplements, and plates; and the Britannica included
individual indexes to the lengthier articles in its 2nd edition (1778–84) and provided its
first separate index volume for the 7th edition (1830–42). The nature of good indexing
was still far from being fully understood, however, and it was only later in the 19th
century that really good encyclopaedia indexes were prepared. In the 20th-century
encyclopaedias that provided indexes, the reader was invariably advised to read the
guides to their use, because the index had become a sophisticated tool that offered a
wealth of information in one alphabetical sequence. Breaking with the alphabetical
approach to indexing, the Britannica Electronic Index, made available in 1992, was an
inventory of all index terms of the Encyclopædia Britannica; it was to be used topically
by the reader. By the 21st century, electronic indexing had grown so sophisticated that
it facilitated movement through a database, showed topical relationships, and
occasionally offered users the opportunity to form their own groupings of related
articles.

Illustrative material

The use of illustrations in encyclopaedias goes back almost certainly to St. Isidore’s
time. One of the most beautiful examples of an illustrated encyclopaedia was the
abbess Herrad’s 12th-century Hortus deliciarum. In many earlier encyclopaedias the
illustrations were often more decorative than useful, but from the end of the 17th
century the better encyclopaedias began to include engraved plates of great accuracy
and some of great beauty. The Encyclopédie is particularly distinguished for its superb
volume of plates—reprinted in the 20th century. In modern times the trend has been

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toward more lavish illustration of encyclopaedias, including elaborate coloured
anatomical plates with superimposed layers, and specially inset small coloured
halftones, as well as marginal line drawings. With the advent of electronic delivery of
databases, intricate animations and audio and video clips became common features of
online and disc-based encyclopaedias.

Engraved plate depicting a ship, from the first edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (1768–
71).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The level of writing

The American editor Franklin H. Hooper, undaunted by his own lack of scholarship,
took a notable part in ensuring that the articles of the 11th edition of Encyclopædia
Britannica were kept within the mental range of the average reader. The problem of the
encyclopaedist has always been to strike the right mean between too learned and too
simplified an approach. The Roman Cassiodorus wrote his encyclopaedia to provide a
bridge between his unlettered monks and the scholarly books he had preserved for their
use. Hugh of Saint-Victor, the theologian and philosopher, achieved one of the best

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approaches in his charming Didascalion (c. 1128), in which he used an elegant and
simple style that everyone could appreciate. The abbess Herrad, knowing her audience,
described in didactic fashion the history of the world (with emphasis on biblical stories)
and its content, with commentaries and beautifully coloured miniatures designed to
help and edify the nuns in her charge. The master of Dante, Brunetto Latini, wanted to
reach the Italian cultured and mercantile classes with his Li livres dou trésor (c. 1264;
“Treasure Books”) and therefore used a concise and accurate style that evoked an
immediate and general welcome. Gregor Reisch managed to cover the whole university
course of the day in his brief Margarita philosophica, which correctly interpreted the
taste of the younger generation at the end of the 15th century.

Until the 17th century a great many encyclopaedias had been written by clerics for
clerics, and further examples continued to be published. After that time, more popular
works began to be published as well, particularly in France, where
such palatable compilations as the Sieur Saunier’s Encyclopédie des beaux
esprits (1657; “Encyclopaedia of Great Minds”) had an immediate success. The
philosopher Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) introduced the
lay reader to the necessity of reading more critically; in this his work constituted a
forerunner of the Encyclopédie, with its challenges to many undiscriminating
assumptions about religion and politics, history and government. On the other hand, the
contemporary Dictionnaire universel of the Jesuit fathers of Trévoux had a popularity
among the orthodox that caused it to run through six editions and then gradually to
expand from three to eight volumes between 1704 and 1771.

Supplementary material

The idea of keeping encyclopaedias up-to-date by means of supplements, yearbooks,

and so on, dates back more than two centuries. In 1753 a two-volume supplement to the
7th edition of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia was compiled by George Lewis Scott, a
tutor to the English royal family. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, a publisher, issued a four-
volume supplement to the Encyclopédie (1776–77), in spite of Diderot’s refusal to edit it.
The Britannica included a 200-page appendix in the last volume of the 2nd edition
(1784) and issued a two-volume supplement to the 3rd edition (1801; reprinted
1803). Brockhaus broke new ground by issuing in monthly parts (1857–64) a yearbook
to the 10th edition (1851–55), which, on the commencement of the issue of the 11th
edition, changed its name to Unsere Zeit (“Our Times”) and doubled its frequency
(1865–74). In 1907 Larousse began publication of the Larousse mensuel
illustré (“Monthly Illustrated Larousse”). The New International Encyclopaedia issued
a yearbook from 1908 (retrospective to 1903), and the Britannica issued one yearbook
in 1913 and recommenced with the Britannica Book of the Year in 1938. The publication
of supplements has a much longer history in China, but the system on which the Chinese
operated was very different from that of the West. By the second half of the 20th
century, yearbooks had become a common feature of most general encyclopaedias. In
the main, they proved more effective in recording the events and discoveries of each
year than keeping the main articles up-to-date. They also performed an essential duty in

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informing their readers of much that was not reported or that was only inadequately
reported in the press; at the same time, they provided a more reasoned assessment and
perspective than the daily newspapers and the weekly commentaries could usually
achieve.

Some of the leading encyclopaedias offered additional services during the second half of
the 20th century that provided the reader with the expert guidance necessary to get the
best from a modern encyclopaedia’s complex contents. To this end, small subject guides
were sometimes issued, which in narrative form outlined the whole field and brought
each topic into perspective, drawing attention to the appropriate articles that would
throw further light on the matter. A research service was another supplementary feature
offered by some established encyclopaedias. Through such services, purchasers were
permitted to submit a limited number of questions about topics either not dealt with in
the set or dealt with inadequately. These services were provided in a variety of ways. In
some cases, frequently asked questions were answered with previously prepared reports
listed in the publisher’s catalog; in others, questions were referred to a special office
staff for answers culled from the publisher’s own databases; in still others, they were
referred to researchers stationed at selected specialized libraries.

Other supplementary material sometimes issued by encyclopaedias ranged from 10-year

illustrated surveys of events to sets of books considered to have had a major impact on
humankind. Although few publishers included dictionaries as an integral part of their
encyclopaedia, they frequently supplied a well-known, independently compiled work as
part of their service. During the last quarter of the 20th century, it became an
increasingly common custom for an encyclopaedia to incorporate an atlas and a
gazetteer, often in the last volume.

Problems of encyclopaedias

Authorship

In using a reputable encyclopaedia, the reader is inclined to accept the authenticity of

any article he or she happens to read. Subconsciously the reader is aware that the highly
organized staff of scholars credited for the work must inevitably have ensured the
scrutiny of all material. Nevertheless, over the course of the 20th century, editors of
encyclopaedias tended more and more to commission signed articles by well-known
experts. For its 1922 supplement, Britannica commissioned articles from some of the
most famous men and women of the day: “Belgium” by the Belgian historian Henri
Pirenne; “Anton Ivanovich Denikin” by the Russian-born jurist and historian Sir Paul
Vinogradoff; “Drama” by St. John Ervine, the British playwright and novelist;
“Czechoslovakia” by the Czech statesman Tomáš Masaryk; and “Russian Army” by Gen.
Yuri Danilov. This created a new dimension in encyclopaedias, for it introduced a
personal element on a scale previously seen only in the columns of the Encyclopédie.
There is in fact a difference in the treatment of a subject written by a politician such as

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Masaryk and by an academic historian of distinction. Each writer has something
important to offer, and the results will be very different.

Encyclopaedia writing requires teamwork in which each article is edited in relation to

others closely connected by subject. If a writer makes a statement that is partly qualified
or totally contradicted in another article, the contributions of both writers must be
scrutinized by the editorial staff, whose job it is to effect some kind of eventual
agreement. Truth can be viewed from many standpoints, and references to any
controversy may produce problems demanding all the skill and tact of the editors to
resolve, particularly when the reputation of the writer is at stake in a signed article.

Length restrictions

The restrictions imposed by the space available for any particular article in a print
encyclopaedia are of great consequence. Writing such articles is an art of its own; within
a limited space so much must be compressed—nothing important can be omitted,
nothing trivial should be included.

Revision and updating

The revision and updating of an encyclopaedia is one of the greatest challenges to its
makers, one to which many ingenious, if admittedly partial, solutions have been found.
The problem of keeping an encyclopaedia up-to-date has two facets: the first is to assure
that any one printing or edition is as up-to-date as possible at the time of its
preparation, and the second is to make it possible for purchasers of a print set to
maintain the set in an up-to-date condition. One apparent answer to both aspects, the
loose-leaf format, has never been a publishing success. Nelson’s Perpetual Loose Leaf
Encyclopaedia (second edition, 1920) was discontinued; the prestigious Encyclopédie
française (1935–66), however, continued to be available in both loose-leaf and bound
volumes during the 20th century.

Louis Moréri set an example in his rapid incorporation of new information in each
succeeding issue of his widely used Grand Dictionnaire historique (1674; “The Great
Historical Dictionary”). When the German publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus first
issued his great encyclopaedia, he was forced by an unexpectedly large public demand to
issue edition after edition in quick succession (some of them even overlapped). In all of
these he took great pride in providing the latest information, personally supervising
much of the revision of individual articles. Moreover, he provided special supplements
incorporating these revisions for purchasers of each edition.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, most encyclopaedias that lasted long enough to require
revision met the problem by preparing a new edition or by issuing supplements. In the
case of Encyclopædia Britannica, the first edition (1768–71) was replaced by an
essentially new and enlarged second edition in 1777–84; the ninth edition (1875–89),

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however, remained in print until the preparation of the 11th edition (1910–11), with a
10th edition nominally created by the addition of 11 supplementary volumes in
the interim. Among the most serious shortcomings of the new-edition method was the
tendency of publishers to dismiss editorial staff after the preparation of a new edition, a
practice which meant that skilled editors were dispersed and had to be replaced once the
decision to create a new edition had been taken.

Early in the 20th century it became the practice to fill the gaps between new editions
with annual summaries called yearbooks. A turning point came when, soon after the
publication of its 14th edition in 1929, Encyclopædia Britannica announced the
introduction of a system of continuous revision that in one form or another became the
practice of most major encyclopaedias in many countries. Under continuous revision
programs, some percentage of the articles in a print set are updated or improved in
other ways on a flexible schedule. Several publishers were able to take advantage of
20th-century printing technologies to reprint their sets on an annual basis and to
introduce into each new printing as many revised entries as possible. The system
implied the existence of a permanent editorial department able, with the assistance of
academic advisers and article authors, to monitor the condition of entries on a constant
basis.

Continuous revision has certain drawbacks. The most serious disadvantage may relate
to the rapidity with which articles in a set become noticeably unbalanced in relation to
one another. Changes and events requiring revision of articles are more readily apparent
in the scientific, technological, biographical, and historical areas, with the result that
articles in such fields are revised much more frequently than articles in such fields as the
humanities, where important changes do occur, though more subtly.

An equally important disadvantage in continuous revision has to do with

the inherent difficulty of revising, on an article-by-article basis, a set of reference books
containing many thousands of articles. First, editors are usually unable to revise all the
articles that might be affected by a new development. In the case of the assassination of
a president, for instance, the editors of the next printing might add the event to the
president’s biography and even to the history of the country but be unable to
acknowledge the event in all the other articles in which the president’s name appears.
Second, updating a single article is not always as simple as it might at first appear to be.
In a biography, for instance, critical events can occur so often that it soon becomes no
longer possible simply to add an additional sentence to the end of the piece: the death of
the subject of the biography might be the occasion for a reassessment of the person’s
significance or for the disclosure of long unknown or unpublicized information; in
archaeology, a new discovery may be at serious variance with several previously held
theories on which a whole article might well be based. In such instances, revision must
go beyond the simple addition of a sentence or the insertion of a word or date and may
involve partial or complete rewriting. With the rapid pace of modern research, this can
quickly become an ever-present editorial problem of great complexity.

Controversy and bias

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Throughout the years, most major encyclopaedias have been accused of reflecting bias
in one or more of their articles. In the Encyclopédie the lack of neutrality was
intentional and apparent. Various editions of Encyclopædia Britannica, almost from
the beginning, were accused of bias as well. The practice of relying on outside specialists
for articles, a practice now followed by most serious encyclopaedias, has increased the
likelihood that bias will be worked into an article. Many critics have felt that the reader
is protected in such cases by the fact that the identity of the contributor is not hidden. It
has also been argued that the presence of slanted opinions in an article gave to older
encyclopaedias a colour and sense of conviction that is lacking in most modern works.
Modern editors of major encyclopaedias nevertheless make every effort to eliminate any
hint of bias in their products, but the task is a difficult one. For example, an account of
the Korean War might vary according to whether it was written by a North or South
Korean, a Chinese, or an American writer.

Similarly, the inclusion of a map showing the frontiers between two or more nations
may give rise to vigorous controversy if the nations involved dispute any part of the
boundaries as shown. The illustration of a painting with an attribution to one artist may
draw strong protests from art critics who do not agree with the writer. Controversy
today has grown rapidly on many subjects that were not earlier in dispute.

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