Word: ebbing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Mail Order. Today, EB is one of the most prosperous properties ($2,000,000 net in royalty revenues since 1943) of the University of Chicago. It became such seven years ago, when ex-Adman William Benton, now Democratic Senator from Connecticut, maneuvered its transfer from Sears, Roebuck & Co. ("Do you think it appropriate that a mail-order house should own the encyclopaedia?" he had asked). Benton still heads EB's board of directors, while Chicago's retiring Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins still presides over its board of editors. The top editing job belongs to wiry Editor Walter Yust...
Once he has decided, he submits his ideas to a permanent set of advisers on any of four university campuses-Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge and London. His advisers in turn recommend a top authority to write the piece Yust wants-at EB's traditional 2? a word...
...each new printing, anywhere from 1,500,000 to 3,000,000 words have to be written. Some articles can become obsolete almost overnight (e.g., as late as 1946, EB said that uranium's "chief use is in the ceramic industry"). Other articles merely need touching up. But every article is reexamined at least once a decade...
Over the years, EB has assembled a formidable array of authors. Lord Macaulay is still there with his article on Sam Johnson; so is Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, with his piece on Mary, Queen of Scots. Einstein has written on spacetime, and H. L. Mencken on Americanism; Shaw wrote on socialism, Trotsky on Lenin. But Editor Yust sometimes travels far from the world of doctorates and Nobel Prizes. For his expert on nightclubs, he picked the Stork Club's Sherman Billingsley; for boxing, Gene Tunney; for rodeo, Cowboy "Foghorn" Clancy...
...EB offers its readers more than a mere 24 volumes of knowledge. Any owner of a set is entitled to ask EB any 50 questions in ten years that he cares to, and readers send in queries at the rate of 35,000 a year-from "Who is the Unknown Soldier?" to "What color was Eve's hair?" Some readers also like to try to catch EB in error, but relatively few have done so in Walter Yust's 20 years. With some of the world's top experts on call, and with the constant revision that...