Word: britannicas
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...education's better ironies is that the broad, stately river of classified knowledge named Encyclopaedia Britannica began 190 years ago in a clear, sparkling rill of Scotch whisky. The tale of the encyclopedia's turbulent course from the Edinburgh workshop of hard-drinking Editor William Smellie to its present serene residence at the University of Chicago is told in The Great EB (University of Chicago Press; 339 pp.; $4.95) by Herman Kogan, drama critic and books editor of the Chicago Sun-Times...
...Europe's Enlightenment was in full vigor; Denis Diderot's French Encyclopedic had just come out, and Britain was ripe for an up-to-date compendium of all knowledge. The Britannica's founders were Colin Macfarquhar, a small-business man of Edinburgh, and Andrew Bell, an engraver of dog collars, who stood 4½ ft. tall, and had a nose so embarrassingly big that he used to mock his mockers with an even larger one of papier-mache. Smellie, their 28-year-old choice for editor, spieled long Latin poems when drunk, and was celebrated...
...Britannica sold more than 3,000 sets at ?12 apiece, enough for Bell and Macfarquhar to plan a second edition. By 1777, when work started, Smellie had gone off (later to become a boozing buddy of Robert Burns), and the publishers replaced him with James Tytler, a scholar just as whiskyfied and twice as eccentric, being given to balloon ascensions. Editor Tytler stayed on the ground long enough to get out a ten-volume, 8,595-page encyclopedia...
...Dolley (not Dolly) Madison, wife of the nation's fourth President, justified the spelling by recent research at the University of Chicago on the James Madison papers, proving that the famed White House hostess had indeed used the "e" herself. Among references due for a change: the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which calls her Dorothy, the Encyclopedia Americana, which lists her as Dolly...
Fire When Ready! In April 1897 T.R. was appointed by G.O.P. President William McKinley as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Spanish reinforcements were pouring across the Atlantic to wipe out freedom fighters in Cuba. More ominously, Germany and Japan were building fleets to challenge Pax Britannica and tilt the world balance of power. T.R. argued for war with Spain to kick the Spaniards % out of Cuba and to get the U.S. into world posture, a course also advocated by T.R.'s mentor and friend, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, as the only...