Word: yust
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Buying cheap (2? a word for articles) and selling dear ($298 to $1,500 a set), the Britannica has since earned the university some $5,500,000. Its 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...
...onetime literary editor on the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Walter Yust, 56, is used to deadlines, and his deadlines never stop coming. Every year, he puts out a whole new printing of the Britannica. He must decide which articles he thinks need rewriting, and what new subjects need be added...
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...
...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...
...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 leaves "no relief of finishing," Editor Yust believes EB to be the most accurate storehouse of facts in the world. "I won't believe we're wrong," says...