Word: adler
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When the work was two-thirds finished, Britannica got discouraged with the amount of money Adler was spending (about $25,000 a month) and called a halt. Adler started phoning desperately. He sent Hutchins around the flank to Britannica's bankers, wangled permission to finish the job with only four editors (it took two more years). When it turned out that Britannica had no funds for an immediate sales campaign, Adler started writing letters, published brochures, finally hopped a plane and started selling in person. Notable catches: William Paley, Paul Mellon, Marshall Field, Conrad Hilton, Harold Swift. His biggest...
...Touch of Megalomania? With the Syntopicon out of the way, Adler might have relaxed, but, as his wife puts it, "he has a clock built inside him." He never stops ticking. His restless eyes have an intensely pained look, particularly when he has to sit still and listen to someone else talk. In appearance, friends have compared him to a better-fed Savonarola. He likes Brooks Brothers suits, good leather, fast cars, fine food (the waitresses at his favorite restaurants are under strict instruction not to tempt him with rolls and desserts), but whatever he enjoys, he usually enjoys...
...keeps a favorite cartoon on his office wall to kid his strong views on the need for religion (see cut). Once, after a particularly forceful lecture in San Francisco, a woman asked him whether he could have made an equally strong argument for the opposite proposition. "That," sighed Adler, "is the first sensible question of the evening. The answer...
...Adler is already off on his next great project, which, if he succeeds, will make the Syntopicon look like an exam pony. Adler wants to summarize all the knowledge of the Western world in one vast work, comparable to Aquinas' 13th century Summa or Diderot's 18th century Encyclopaedia. His aim: to help end the Babel of Western civilization, in which specialists in various fields not only disagree but cannot even argue with each other in the same language. He does not want to reach conclusions, but simply clear the decks for "some future philosophic genius" by summing...
...Dostoevsky, William James, Freud. Most controversial omissions: Luther, Calvin, Moliere, Voltaire, Dickens, Balzac, Einstein. † New coinage meaning "collection of topics." * Positivists are the philosophical school, virtually dominant in the U.S. and Britain today, which suggests that philosophy is merely a tool for the logical analysis of limited propositions. Adler hates the positivists' guts, and they his. * Students in his first class: Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers...