Everything Explained That Is Explainable!

February 22, 2016
Boyles (How to Catch a Pig) ventures too deep into minutiae in this painstaking account of the venture behind the 11th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The prime mover behind the 11th edition and central figure in this narrative was Horace Everett Hooper, an American entrepreneur and bookseller, who dreamed of a magnificent edifice of everything worth knowing, published as a single work, that would also be a profitable product. Those twin pursuits fill the book, with the business end taking pride of place over the actual construction of the encyclopedia and its epistemological considerations. Boyles emphasizes Hooper’s long association with the Times of London; Hooper felt that the gravitas of the newspaper brand would strengthen the Encyclopaedia Britannica readership while buoying the bottom line of the declining paper. Boyles also sketches the 11th edition’s editorial staff, focusing on editor-in-chief Hugh Chisolm and senior editor and indexer Janet Hogarth. Boyles certainly comes close to explaining everything there is to know about this publication—or maybe it’s just that by the end of the book, it’s hard to imagine wanting to know anything else.

September 1, 2016

Boyles (journalism and political science, Institut Catholique d'Etudes Superieures, La Roche-sur-Yon, France; Superior, Nebraska: The Common Sense Values of America's Heartland) here presents the fascinating story of the classic 11th edition (1910-11) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Taking nearly a decade to produce, the 11th edition was written by 1,507 authors and contained more than 44 million words, filling 29 leather-bound volumes. The tomes, which were originally designed to be a collection of all knowledge, were thoroughly indexed and written in the style of the late Victorian and Edwardian ages. This unusual work focuses on American entrepreneur Horace Everett Hooper, founder of the Western Book and Stationery Co. and inventor of the business model of selling books directly to readers, and how he joined with his partners William Montgomery Jackson and Henry Haxton to talk the London Times into publishing Britannica. Boyles discusses the intense work of the compilers to prepare the 11th edition, the threat to the project by a new owner of the Times, a complex legal battle between Hooper and Jackson, and Cambridge University Press's last-minute save of the work. The in-depth research includes a thorough review of extensive original source letters, newspaper reports and advertisements, and memoirs. Narrator Corrie James's steadily paced reading connects erudite listeners with this intriguing story. Note that the print book includes many photographs and period illustrations, and the notes and appendixes add additional anecdotes and other useful pieces of information. VERDICT All libraries will want this before encyclopedia volumes are only seen in archaeological digs. ["The balance of biography, history, and primary-source material makes for a compelling read more appropriate for scholarly readers than readers of popular historical nonfiction": LJ 4/1/16 review of the Knopf hc.]--Dale Farris, Groves, TX

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