Posted By BillHeise on June 12, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
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My wife used to complain about my copy of the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition, since the books were solidly bound but had old, hard cardboard covers which would break off in flutters of dust. Nevertheless, it was the best $40 I ever spent.

Why 11th edition? Once again, my friend and bookstore owner Eduard Vidmar had told me that the 11th edition had a reputation of being the most complete encyclopedia ever produced in history. That was enough for me, so I went to the Brandeis book sale, which was held in the parking lot of Edens Plaza, which, by chance, was also the place where the Edens Plaza Bank where I was working at the time, was located. Since I didn’t have a car, I waited outside all day, went to the Encyclopedia desk and found a copy of a relatively cheap 11th edition.

After that, I read it incessantly for more than 20 years. It’s packed away in the basement now, in large part because it was scanned in to the Wikipedia as the foundation of the Internet encyclopedia.

I learned more from this book in less time than in all the other books I’ve ever read combined. I learned about history, philology, paleontology, the Bible, music, the Middle Ages, the arts, sciences, mathematics, Shakespeare, aesthetics, Plato and Aristotle, logic, and Belgian literature by reading the first the articles in Encyclopedia Britannica. Of course, if anyone lived after 1910, that wasn’t covered. However, I had always been attracted more to ancient knowledge than modern. Besides, in my opinion, the world was changed by eruption of the first world war. After World War I, people thought differently about life than they had before the war.

I once got in trouble for citing the “Chronology” article in 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a paper on Shakespeare. I immediately ran up to my professor’s office and asked him if he gives me better source than Britannica site for such obscure information as Renaissance chronology. He said he could not, and we both agreed that I could use the Encyclopaedia Britannica but that I could not cite it, as it was considered by most to be a form of cheating.

This is why in my chapter on “Research” in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing I tell my students that they should use the Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROM or Wikipedia when they do their research but that they should not cite either one.

This insistence on not using either of these sources, which students use anyway, seems to reflect a bureaucratic position on research: it’s more important to find books in a haphazard manner than it is to find books in an orderly manner if you have to use an Encyclopedia. I voice my disagreement with my academic colleagues over this, but I’m old enough (and perhaps a wise enough) to realize that you can’t fight City Hall.

Categories: Books, Personal, Philosophy
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