Word: britannicas
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With success at their back, the Britannica's proprietors now want to produce a new edition. Major articles are to be vastly expanded, a substantial amount of history added. Most radically, there will be an account of the lives of the most eminent persons from the earliest ages down to the present tunes...
Drop in any evening at a literary pub in Edinburgh and you are likely to find William Smellie, who will expansively declare that he was the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1771. And he is apt to say of his achievement: "I wrote most of it, my lad, and snipped out from books enough material for the printer. With pastepot and scissors I composed it." But as of now, Editor Smellie is finished at the Britannica. Because of the encyclopedia's success, both in Britain and the Colonies, the owners wanted all three volumes expanded according...
...idea for the Britannica was conceived back in 1768 by Colin Macfarquhar, a young (then 22) bookseller and printer. Needing capital, he enlisted the aid of Andrew Bell, some 20 years his senior, who had begun his career engraving dog collars and progressed to the eminence of Edinburgh's leading printer-engraver. Bell stands only 4 feet 6 inches tall and has a huge nose, but he disarms the mockery of others by making mock of himself. He mounts his giant horse with the aid of a ladder, carrying with him a papier-mache nose to enlarge...
...choice is not so odd as it seems. The son of a minister, Tytler worked his way through medical school. He has tried out as both surgeon and apothecary, and failed in several tries and in several places. When the Britannica proprietors found him, he was in Holyrood House, that sanctuary for debtors, working at a press of his own design and printing his essays on religion and politics. As a man who may not bestride but at least straddles the worlds of both scientific and religious thought?though admittedly master of neither?he may be ideally suited...
Philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, chairman of the board of editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, rejects the antischool trend. But he concedes there may be good reason for the rising disbelief in the ultimate educability of everyone. Undifferentiated schooling, writes Adler, may be "doomed to defeat by differences in the children's economic, social and ethnic backgrounds and especially differences in the homes from which they come...