I've got the 13th edition (1926). What's great about the older editions is discovering that "real" experts contributed to the encyclopaedia. (For example, Albert Einstein writing about Space-Time, Sigmund Freud writing about the Freudian School of Psychoanalysis.)
I grew up with a 1943 edition of encyclopedia Britannica in the house. I can remember looking at the maps volume and seeing no highways in the United States, only railroads.
It also included an EXHAUSTIVE article about Mormons that I used for a school paper one time.
You could really tell that the authors of the articles CARED.
Older encyclopaedias (even MS Encarta) were a joy to simply read. Each article was written with a flair, not just with an objective to dryly impart data. I used to spend hours just reading random articles and following links, getting deeper and deeper into a particular crevice. I really think I have read 90% of the entire 1997 edition.
I feel sad for the kids today who have to make do with Wikipedia. It's amazing, no doubt, to have a free, editable, comprehensive source of information on everybody's fingertips. But the articles seem to lack the artistic touch, they are rarely a joy to read.
I think the common advice not to cite Wikipedia is telling, because nobody had any problems with citing Britannica. Why's that?
>I think the common advice not to cite Wikipedia is telling, because nobody had any problems with citing Britannica. Why's that?
Wikipedia has "editors" that throw things together and reference "sources." Some sources being better than others.
Looking at the 13th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica: Niels Bohr (atom), Marie Curie (part of the radium article), Albert Einstein (space-time), Sigmund Freud (Freudian School of Psychoanalysis), Harry Houdini (conjuring). <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Encyclopaedia-Britannica-En...>
Each Britannica article is written in conjunction by editors and experts. There're no experts in Wikipedia, only editors. So you cannot assume that an article has at least been reviewed by an authority. (Although they may have since lots of scientists contribute on it.)
I’m fortunate enough to have a an entire set from 1989 that my father bought for me and my older sister. I refuse to get rid of it. At the moment the set is in my old bedroom in my parents house but one day I intend to feature it prominently in my library.. it’s funny how one can get attached like that.
Would you be kind enough to check if that version contains anything on calculating the length of the perimeter of an ellipse. Backstory, I was living in London in 1990 and this guy was trying to sell me & girlfriend a set of the E.B. I asked him to show me the article on the length of the perimeter of an ellipse and he ... well, he didn't. Later I discovered that it is a very tricky matter. But I wonder if there is anything in that version that mentions the difficulty.
A lot of these problems in math with no exact solution could have an exact solution if we defined some new function. Another way, we wouldn't have exact solutions to the angles of a triangle from the length of the sides without the sine function. I wonder if any of these hypothetical functions have utility outside their specific problems.
For anyone confused: There is no exact equation for the perimiter of a circle either. It looks like there is because we use Pi - but Pi is not exact, you need an infinite series to calculate it, just like you need an infinite series for the perimeter of a ellipse.
Yes, but the point is the Pi is hiding an infinite series, just like the what you'd see for an ellipse length.
The more interesting point for me is to phrase it as: why can't we write the lenght of an ellipse as some function of pi, since you're able to do that for most trig functions.
In mid 80ies, I wrote a huge article for school history project on Genghis Khan using reference material from my grandmother's copy of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 50 volume edition from likely mid 50ies, USSRs answer to Britannica. Gorgeous drawings, gilded cover, lots of really insightful articles. I learned a lot about Mongol invasion and got top grades. I wonder where those books went after her death...
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia had an English edition. I once came across it in a public library. It was an interesting read. The articles on mathematics were jewels. They'd clearly been written by people who really understood the subject. The articles on economics were interesting, as they went into the nuts and bolts of how planning in the USSR worked. It wasn't optimized for money. It was optimized for criteria such as minimum ton-miles of transportation. The political articles were just weird. They read like too many people had censored them.
I studied art history in university, and for some reason, when looking up a certain obscurer topic brought up during a lecture on architecture, the only online source mentioning at the time was the English edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Nowadays other sources mention it, but at first glance the GSE still seems to be the only source actually describing it.
I wish there was a proper offline version of the GSE, since consulting it through https://www.thefreedictionary.com is rather cumbersome.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia was by its nature USSR only. I only ever saw Russian language version.
Or if you ask about Chenghiz Khan, lots have been written about him. I have "CHINGGIS KHAN: The Golden History of the Mongols" from Folio Society (https://www.amazon.com/CHINGGIS-KHAN-Golden-History-Mongols/...), a book from roughly 7 centuries ago from his contemporaries. It reads like a mixture of poetry and really bloody fantasy. All of the geographic places are unrecognizable to modern reader. Great stuff.
There is an English version. It pops up when looking up subjects on https://www.thefreedictionary.com/, but I don't think there's a way to directly browse it (and I find the site in general rather cumbersome to use).
It’s been 40 years so I don’t remember what it was called, but my local library in Indiana had a copy of a Soviet encyclopedia in English. It was fascinating looking at the different perspective on world events.
Indeed. I think it's always interesting to read what people thought then, without benefit of hindsight. If you want to dismiss it based on what we now know, I'll just ask, "What things do you believe today that will be embarrassing in 40 years?"
The absolute worst thing about time-travel movies (e.g. Back to the Future) is the pandering to modern audiences: "These kids are so dumb! They don't know about Chuck Berry duck-walking!"
When I was a child in Southern California in the 1960s, we had a set of the 1910/1911 eleventh edition of the Britannica in our home. At around fourteen, I bought my own set of the 1875 ninth edition for ten dollars at a church rummage sale and read it a lot. After I left home, my parents donated that set to the same church rummage sale, where it sold again for ten dollars.
Around 1980, in Chicago, I bought a set of the 1926 thirteenth edition—basically the same as the eleventh, plus a supplement—for, if I remember correctly, around a hundred dollars. Some years after I moved to Japan in 1983, I had that thirteenth edition shipped to me, and I still have it [1]. These days, though, when I read old Britannicas, I usually do so online [2].
For a while, I also owned a more recent edition from the 1980s and I used it a lot to look up facts, names, dates, etc. After Wikipedia matured, I sold it.
Care to give us some insights, rather than a list of transactions?
Why did you buy again? Why did you buy the older set when you had a newer set, and why did the same reason not apply after Wikipedia matured? How would you contrast the old encyclopedias vs Wikipedia?
I bought the ninth edition so I could have copy in my own bedroom; I was possessive about books as a child.
I bought the thirteenth edition after reading an article in the New Yorker magazine about the eleventh. I’ve added a screenshot of the first page of that article to my website above.
As explained in that New Yorker article as well as in the parent Spectator article, those old Britannicas made particularly good reading for people who like reading deeply about miscellaneous topics. Later editions aimed for more objectivity and, because of all that happened in the twentieth century, had to cover more topics on the same amount of (or even less) paper. That made them less suitable for expository writing and for recreational reading.
From 1986 until 2005, I worked at home as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator. I translated a wide variety of texts about many topics, many of which I was not familiar with (currency sorting machines, oil refinery equipment, Korean ceramics, automobile racing, French film, ...). Since going to a library to look up a few words or facts would take a lot of time, I gradually acquired a large collection of paper dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference books. I also bought quite a few CD-ROM references, though most of those had the same content as the paper versions.
Beginning in the late 1990s, first with search engines (AltaVista, Google) and then with Wikipedia, it became quick and easy to look up facts online, and I gradually stopped using paper references.
As others have noted here, Wikipedia is not as entertaining a reading experience as the old Britannicas, which could be opinionated, even witty, while also reflecting the prejudices and biases of the authors and their age. Wikipedia’s great strength is its breadth. The topics covered in Britannica have always been slanted toward matters that mainstream academics and educators consider important and legitimate. It was nearly useless for pop culture and subculture topics, and it didn’t have enough space for all of the obscure stuff that Wikipedia covers in often obsessive detail.
Of course Wikipedia has problems with errors, vandalism, and sometimes sloppy writing, but overall it is a magnificent achievement. I am very grateful to be able to use it.
> Of course Wikipedia has problems with errors, vandalism, and sometimes sloppy writing, but overall it is a magnificent achievement.
Wikipedia is a magnificent achievement, one that is held back by regression to the mean (anything very well written has a high probability/inevitability of replacement by something written by somebody who doesn't appreciate the qualities of good writing), political correctness and similar censorship, and concerted narrow interest public relations scrubbing (which you might say is covered by vandalism but which I think is not)
I think my ordering and emphasis is more accurate.
My grandfather was born in 1906, I remember reading through a very old encyclopaedia that he had had when young. At the time I found it amusing that the map of the South Pole looked like a rough sketch lacking in any detail.
Given the trend we've seen towards dictionaries rewriting definitions of words and sites like Wikipedia scrubbing long-existing content in the name of combating "misinformation", I'd like to have a set of older hardcopies of encyclopedias and dictionaries so things that are being erased are still preserved somewhere.
Do you have a reference for the trend of dictionaries rewriting words? Is it any different then dictionaries keeping up with the way language is being used in the present? Also, don't new definitions usually get added on top of the older ones? (E.g. literally meaning both literally and figuratively now)
1975 edition, ftw! :) As a kid I read the set my parents bought cover to cover until I went to highschool.
I had an opportunity to buy a very old set of these at a book store that was going out of business and having like a 95% off sale, and by the time I decided to turn around and go back to buy them, they were gone. :(
I grew up with the physical set. My parents even lashed out on the micropaedia and macropaedia 12 book set. Which had very handy articles beyond the normal Britannica. It was like having the internet in those days.
In retirement my dad took to correcting the Britannica- ie fixing facts or crossing out entire debunked articles.
