Word: britannicas
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When he turned to literature, he raised travel writing to the level of art (Cities, The World of Venice), branched skillfully into history (Pax Britannica), and once turned a bespoke book on, of all things, the World Bank (The Road to Huddersfield) into one of the more memorable popular essays on economics. Yet, as Jan Morris admits in her first book, Conundrum, an autobiography about the switch from "James to Jan," James Morris regularly used to pray "Please, God, make me a girl...
Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 into a family stiff with tradition. He was raised on rectitude and duty. His books were carefully selected; the Encyclopaedia Britannica was permitted, but Tom Sawyer was not. At Harvard, Eliot took boxing lessons, fell under the influence of Irving Babbitt, a hard-minded classicist who was one of his professors, and was introduced to the poetry of Jules Laforgue...
Assembling, editing and checking the 43 million words in the 30 volumes of Britannica 3 (v. 37 million words in 24 volumes of the 14th edition) was a task that Editor Warren E. Preece compares to fighting a war. There was total concentration, joint commitment and excitement, he says, "but I don't know anyone who was intimately involved who would knowingly do it again." The staff of 360 was driven relentlessly-some were reduced to tears-by the deadline-conscious Adler. A few scholars balked at the restraints on their freedom to write as they chose. "It sounds...
Literate Articles. Macropaedia readers will still find the literate, initialed articles by world-renowned experts that are the Britannica's hallmark -but, say the editors, without the overlaps, omissions and inconsistencies of earlier editions. There is Arnold Toynbee on Julius Caesar and leading American Catholic Theologian John L. McKenzie on Roman Catholicism, English Embryologist Sir Gavin de Beer on evolution and Carl Sagan (see BOOKS) on the planets and extraterrestrial life. The late Sir Tyrone Guthrie writes about theater, Anthony Burgess examines the novel, Alan Lomax discusses singing, and Barnaby Conrad summarizes bullfighting. Although more than half the scholarly...
...made Britannica 3 possible was onetime University of Chicago vice president (1937-45) and U.S. Senator (1949-53) William Benton, Encyclopaedia Britannica's majority stockholder and publisher for 30 years. Despite his pride in the current, 14th edition (first published in 1929), he supported his editors' decision to produce a totally new encyclopaedia and agreed to finance the venture. Benton was not on hand for the unveiling; he died last March, two weeks before his 73rd birthday. But in Britannica 3, he has a monument as impressive as any man could want...