[WikiEN-l] Re: Paper is not paper

Wed Oct 5 10:02:37 UTC 2005

> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
>
> The 12th edition from 1922 also had 32 volumes.

I was afraid someone was going to mention that.

Yes, but the three additional volumes, which bring the Encyclopaedia  
up to date with articles on the World War and the latest developments  
in Aeronautics (with a nice diagram of an Immelmann turn), and  
developments in architecture such as the Woolworth Building in New  
York, are captioned "New Volumes" on the spine, have their own  
separate index, and are not integrated into the main text at all.  
There isn't even a page of cross-reference stickers to glue into the  
main volumes (actually I don't know whether Britannica had those;  
World Book certainly did, though).

So IMHO these are not really part of the encyclopedia proper. They  
are more like a three-volume Britannica Book of the Year.

I also _think_ that the Britannica 3 has considerably thicker volumes  
and smaller print than the Eleventh Edition had. Neil Harris says it
has about 44 million words. The Eleventh edition--someone probably  
has an actual word count--has 29 volumes of about 1000 pages each,  
with about two columns of fifty lines of ten words per line =  
30,000,000 words, so the Britannica has grown more than the count of  
volumes would suggest.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/