Word: encyclopedias
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...deadline when a cartoon was lost), Mullin runs sporadically in the other 20 Scripps-Howard papers, regularly in the weekly Sporting News. His madcap figures have also illustrated dozens of magazine articles (LIFE. Saturday Evening Post), peddled Ramblers for American Motors Corp., and brightened Frank G. Menke's Encyclopedia of Sports...
Rather than retail quaint isolated facts, the encyclopedia's first edition had pioneered with complete and orderly treatises, e.g., an explicitly illustrated article on midwifery. The second introduced another innovation, biographies of famous living persons. But there were gaps, notably on the subject of the new United States of America. Although the Salem witch trials were discussed, the American Revolution was not; Boston was mentioned, but there were no articles on New York or Philadelphia. An enterprising American publishing pirate named Thomas Dobson corrected these slights when the third edition began to come out in 1787. Rewriting sections offensive...
...world's famous men as writers. Sir Walter Scott wrote on drama. Harvard President Edward Everett, the first American contributor, wrote a biography of Washington. Lord Rayleigh, the physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1904, was commissioned to write on "Light." He missed his deadline, but the encyclopedia was being published volume by volume in alphabetical order, and his piece was rescheduled under "Optics"-and again as "Undulating Theory of Light." It finally got in under "Wave Theory of Light...
...Horace Hooper, a U.S. book salesman, appeared in Britain, began dealings that led to his buying the Britannica (in 1901). In 1898, he teamed with the Times of London in a hard-sell campaign to hawk the encyclopedia at cut rates with time payments and advertising. A howl arose over the raucous black-type hucksterism in the grey pages of the "Thunderer." Wrote one affronted M.P. to Hooper: "You have made a damnable hubbub, sir, and an assault upon my privacy with your American tactics." But in a few years, Hooper's whooping sold 100,000 sets...
...contributors include 43 Nobel Prizewinners. Editor-in-Chief Walter Yust and a staff of 150 keep a continuous watch on the timeliness of its 43,512 articles. Editor Yust, onetime Philadelphia literary critic, defends the Britannica against an array of complaints, including pro-British bias (although the encyclopedia has been U.S.-owned for half a century) and Americanization. A more serious objection sometimes heard: that the work is too scholarly for laymen, too elementary for scholars. But despite criticism, the encyclopedia's swarm of salesmen boast, with much justification: "When you buy the Britannica, you are getting the best...