Bookbuyer's
Bookend You have to hand it to the American editors of the new Encyclopaedia Britannica. It takes courage to descend on London's Savoy Hotel in the middle of a national emergency to tell the British press how thoroughly inadequate all European encyclopaedias are, and what a dog's dinner Britannica was for the 191 years before they took it under their wing.
The old twenty-four-volume version — which the company's energetic sales staff had been selling away merrily until a few weeks ago — has been replaced by a completely rewritten and reorganised thirty-volume edition, consisting of a ' micropaedia ' (ten volumes of little entries), a ' macropaedia ' (nineteen volumes of big entries) and a propaedia (which is" an outline of the whole of human knowledge" — so there). The cost of producing the new forty-three million word work (" not undertaken so that the profits of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. could be enlarged") was £14 million or, if you prefer, a little over 000,000 a word.
The launching speeches were shorter (5,000 words, in loud volumes) although the editors did manage to endear themselves to the Fleet Street assembly when they admitted that for the first time in several decades the US edition had not been dedicated to the president by name. But by then the Fourth Estate's motives in braving hail and gale to attend the conference had become horribly apparent. They had come to spot mistakes. And did. Bookbuyer, renouncing his usual winter churlishness out of respect for a truly herculean labour, will forbear to mention them. For £249 you can find them yourself. For a bit leSs you may be able to pick up one of the three million out-of-date sets of the previous edition.
Meanwhile a second American company has just treated us to another undertaking of unprecedented magnitude. Unlike Britannica, which was the publishing event of the century, the English translation of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia (CCM Publishers) is merely a cultural event, though it is fair to add that it is the first major attempt at a meaningful pooling of knowledge between the Soviet Union and the English-speaking world, and that no library can consider its reference collection complete without it. In a month when British publishing events appear to pale by comparison. Bookbuyer sought solace in the section marked The British '. It was comforting to learn that the traditional two-family -houses — oldfashioned two-storey dwellings with fireplaces for heating — are still in use here; that many traditional dishes, like beefsteak and porridge, still form part of our cuisine; that in social life we are still attached to the old forms and traditions characteristic of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois; and that the best-known English national ballads are accompanied by the harp and violin.
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