10/10/2017 David Bell: What Weve Lost With the Demise of Print Encyclopedias | New Republic

What Weve Lost With the Demise of Print

As the paperless future approaches, certain sorts of publications have inevitably moved into
the all-digital realm faster than others. Most of us still prefer paper when it comes to beach
novels, for instance, or the cherished volumes of our personal libraries. At the other extreme,
scientic journals eectively went all-digital years ago, and thanks to GPS, maps and road
atlases are quickly following. Last week saw another milestone: the symbolic funeral of paper
encyclopedias, with the inevitable announcement that the Encyclopedia Britannica is ceasing
print publication.

Encyclopedias, along with other reference works, would seem particularly obvious candidates
for digitization. Paper encyclopedias are large, heavy, and expensive ($1,395 for the nal print
edition of Britannica). They are nowhere near as easily and thoroughly searchable as their
digital counterparts. They cannot be easily updated, still less constantly updated. And they are
far more limited in size. The 2002 Britannica contained 65,000 articles and 44 million words.
Wikipedia currently contains close to four million articles and over two billion words (this
information comes, of course, from Wikipedia).

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Yet with the disappearance of paper encyclopedias, a part of the Western intellectual tradition
is disappearing as well. I am not speaking of the idea of impartial, objective, and meticulously
accurate reference. There is no reason this cannot be duplicated in digital media. Even
Wikipedia, despite its amateur, volunteer authors, has emerged as an increasingly important
and accurate reference tool, reaping respectful commentary last month from no less an
authority than William Cronon, president of the American Historical Association.And I am
not speaking of the pleasures that come from the serendipitous browsing of handsome
encyclopedia volumes, in which the idle ip of a nger takes one from Macaroni to Douglas
MacArthur, and thence to Macao, Macbeth, and the Maccabees. The internet provides its own
opportunities for serendipitous discovery.

But the great paper encyclopedias of the past had other, grander ambitions: They aspired to
provide an overview of all human knowledge, and, still more boldly, to put that knowledge
into a coherent, logical order. Even if they mostly organized their articles alphabetically, they
also sought ways to link the material together thematicallyall of it. In 1974, for instance, the
editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica added to the work a one-volume Propaedia, which
sought to provide a detailed outline of human knowledge, while referencing the appropriate
articles of the encyclopedia itself. Large headings such as Life, Society, and Religion were
subdivided into forty-odd divisions and then further into hundreds of individual sections.

The single greatest and most ambitious such attempt to order knowledge, however, appeared
more than two hundred years earlier: the legendary French Encyclopdie edited by Denis
Diderot and Jean le Rond dAlembert (it initially appeared in 32 huge folio volumes, and is now
available online in French in its entirety, and partially in English through an ongoing
collaborative translation project). It was not the rst encyclopedia. Predecessors date from
even before the invention of printing, and proliferated during the Renaissance, as Harvard
historian Ann Blair has recently shown. Like present-day encyclopedias, Diderot and
dAlemberts used alphabetical organization. But as dAlembert himself explained, in a
Preliminary Discourse to the work that became one of the key philosophical texts of the
Enlightenment, it also aimed to set forth the order and connection of the parts of human
knowledge. It did so in several ways: through the Preliminary Discourse itself; through a
visual Map of the System of Human Knowledge; and through a careful system of cross-
references between articles. Diderot himself grandly claimed that the work contained all the
knowledge necessary to save mankind from a new dark ages (What gratitude the next
generation following such troubled times would feel for the men who had taken measures
against their ravages by protecting the knowledge of centuries past!).

As historians know well, the Encyclopdie also had strongly polemical intentions. It attempted
not just to order knowledge, but to reorient readers away from earlier, avowedly religious
systems. It aimed, quite explicitly, to advance toleration, combat religious fanaticism, and
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promote a spirit of pragmatic, rational inquiry and experimentation. The Map of Knowledge
deliberately relegated Religion to a tiny outcropping, alongside Superstition, Divination,
and Black Magic. The learned article Cannibals ended with the mischievous cross-
reference: See Eucharist, Communion, Altar, etc. Not surprisingly, French royal censors
nearly shut the project down altogether. But it arguably did more than any other single work
of the Enlightenment to change how educated people in the West understood the world they
lived in.

In theory, there is no reason a digital encyclopedia could not have ambitions similar to these. A
digital Propaedia could of course provide hyperlinks to individual Encyclopedia articles,
which would work far more eciently than printed cross-references. But in practice, to have
an encyclopedia even try to provide a systematic overview of knowledge requires a xed,
stable body of articlesa discrete edition. After all, if you have the ambition of linking
dierent articles to each other thematically, then each change you make in one article will
require changes to several others. Add a new article, and you have to go back and add many
new references elsewhere. It was dicult enough for Diderot and dAlembert to keep control
of this process over the course of producing their one edition, which (thanks in part to the
censors) took over twenty years to produce. Diderot lamented on more than one occasion that
the project had ruined his life. The Encyclopedia Britannica currently has a sta of roughly a
hundred full-time editors, not to mention the 4,400 contributors it uses (thank you again,
Wikipedia).

For an online encyclopedia, two of the main selling points are comprehensiveness, and being
up-to-date. So even with an enterprise that aspires to scholarly standards of accuracy, the size
will eventually dwarf that of even the largest paper encyclopedias, while requiring a huge
editorial sta to do the (literally) endless revisions. Can one imagine the editors also trying
constantly to revise a map of knowledge, and editing dozens of related articles and
hyperlinks each time they make a single substantive change? It is hard to imagine any such
enterprise making enough money to pay the salaries of the army of editors this would all
require. The online Britannica, tellingly enough, has no Propaedia. On Wikipedia,
contributors do constantly try to update many dierent related articles to take account of new
material they introduce. But Wikipedia, of course, has no plan, no system, no map of human
knowledge.

It might be argued that mapping out human knowledge has always, necessarily, been a
quixotic project, akin to Casaubons Key to All Mythologies. It is very likely that few readers
ever actually delved very deeply into the Propaedia, or made much use of Diderot and
dAlemberts map to navigate the wilds of the 32 individual volumes. The vast majority of
people who actually consulted these encyclopedias most likely turned straight to the

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alphabetical articles, to hunt down specic pieces of information. Today, we use the online
resources in the same way.

But the ambition mattered. It mattered that one could look at a stack of volumes and say: Here
are vast libraries, distilled down into an essence of human knowledge, and organized in a
logical order. The books testied to the hope that, ultimately, human beings had at least a
measure of control over the overpowering torrents of facts and ideas that they collectively
produce. Perhaps no single human being could truly have controlwhat more quixotic
enterprise is there than reading through an encyclopedia from cover to cover? But at least the
existence of the books gave us the sense that some points of dry land remained amidst the
oods, some fragments shored against our ruins. The disappearance of these grand printed
volumes, while inevitable, is yet another depressing sign of just how much we are now adrift
in the limitless oceans of information.

David A. Bell is Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton, and a contributing
editor forThe New Republic.

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