Word: macfarquhar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...American publishing pirate named Thomas Dobson corrected these slights when the third edition began to come out in 1787. Rewriting sections offensive to the U.S., and omitting the word "Britannica" as well as the dedication to George III, he hijacked and printed Encyclopaedia articles as fast as Bell and Macfarquhar could put them out. Plagiarism plagued the Britannica until passage by Congress of the international copyright...