Almost 250 years after it first appeared, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is ceasing its print edition. This signals the end not just of a venerable print reference, but perhaps the end of the encyclopedia itself — and with it the end of how vast realms of knowledge have been transmitted for generations.
In the course of my career, I have edited dozens of reference books — encyclopedias on environmental history, disability history and social movements, as well as on presidential elections, congressional investigations and great disasters in American history. Last month I published the Encyclopedia of Free Blacks and People of Color in the Americas, a two-volume set that will be one of the last encyclopedias I ever edit.
With a sputtering economy and the rise of Wikipedia and Internet resources, the market for hard-bound encyclopedias is dwindling. Like the Britannica, my encyclopedias will only appear in digital format — if they appear at all.
Unlike the Britannica, which, because of its pedigree and majesty, will endure, smaller encyclopedias may soon vanish.
Companies that once produced giant references, such as Collier's and Funk & Wagnalls have disappeared, and those that produce briefer ones face extinction. Small, focused encyclopedias that target a single subject will no longer be profitable, either in print or electronic form. This will have consequences: Despite the profusion of information available on the Internet, the demise of encyclopedias will transform how we gather and process this information and rob us of the vital connections that make information meaningful. As Louis Shores, editor of Collier's, once remarked, the encyclopedia "serves to recall that knowledge has a unity." It is this unity — the unity provided by a human presence, an editor — that Wikipedia and its brethren do not provide, and its absence threatens to undermine centuries of scholarship and how we amass and create knowledge.
Encyclopedias have an ancient lineage, dating back well over 2,000 years. The oldest one that still exists — alas only in fragments — dates from the fourth century B.C. written by Speusippus, a nephew of Plato. The earliest one that survives in its entirety is Historia Naturalis, an encyclopedia of 37 books written by Pliny the Elder in the first century A.D. The biggest encyclopedia ever compiled was likely the Chinese Yung-lo ta-tien, or Great Handbook, a 15th-century work of more than 11,000 volumes compiled by 2,000 scholars. The most influential one ever published was Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie (1751-1765). This exquisitely illustrated 17-volume French work — which set as its goal "to collect all the knowledge that now lies scattered over the face of the Earth" — both reflected and inspired the Enlightenment. And the most authoritative encyclopedia, the Britannica (like Beethoven's Ninth, you don't even have to include a noun to identify the art form), first appeared in 1768 and is now in its 15th edition. Its next one will be only digital.
While none of the encyclopedias I edited were as massive — the largest was a mere eight volumes — they all required painstaking labor.
Encyclopedias remain the most complicated books human beings have ever published. While most literary works, fiction and nonfiction, are written by a single author and contain perhaps a few illustrations, encyclopedias are complex, team efforts that integrate more elements than any other book: signed articles, charts, graphs, tables, illustrations, maps, chronologies, sidebars, primary sources, statistics, fact boxes, glossaries, appendixes, bibliographies and indexes. Some consist of thousands of articles written by hundreds of authors, their every word reviewed by an editor, and require a staff of experts to produce, including mapmakers, artists, page designers, compositors, photo researchers, fact-checkers, copy editors, proofreaders and indexers. The best ones rely on top scholars in their field. While an outstanding reference is distinguished by its breadth of coverage, accuracy of information and consistency of style, the hallmark of a great encyclopedia is its unity: the connection of one article to another. Facts in isolation have limited meaning, but connect them to related facts and concepts and ideas and you create knowledge. The cross-referencing of articles — the links an editor provides to guide the reader to related material — is what makes an encyclopedia more than the sum of its parts. Unlike the voluminous Wikipedia, which grows and grows like an unplanned city, its articles connected by an invisible subway of keywords and hyperlinks, a well-wrought encyclopedia is like a planned community, where every building has been designed for a specific function and placed in the most appropriate and intuitive location. Editors spend endless hours creating this intricate blueprint, ensuring that everything connects directly and seamlessly. This is the essence of the encyclopedia: The connections are made by people and not by words, by choice and not by chance.
But the economic model that enables this is evaporating. The laborious effort of conceptualizing a single-subject encyclopedia and integrating its myriad parts cannot compete with the enormous dump truck of Wikipedia, which, as marvelous as it is, just keeps adding more and more stuff, storing it in an endlessly growing attic of unlimited dimensions.
With its millions of articles, Wikipedia dwarfs its dying print relatives in scope and size. It's also free. But it comes with a price:
The new mega-model of infinite encyclopedic content may well fail to surpass the old one of focused, interwoven material. As Wikipedia replaces the printed encyclopedia, it will not necessarily provide readers a better encyclopedia. Rather than evolve into a superior resource, it threatens to become little more than a profusion of scattered facts, anonymous articles and drifting bits of disconnected data. Without a guiding, human presence, this ever-ballooning reference will lack intellectual authority and scholarly cohesion. Perhaps we will have collected all the information "that now lies scattered over the face of the Earth," but it will be orderless, a haphazard cacophony of material. Unlike Diderot, we will not have collected or created knowledge.
As the digital universe keeps expanding, the links that connect its numberless articles and multitudinous bits of information will grow further and further apart, connected more by random words and assorted terms than by human intent and directed thought. The unity of knowledge will melt away. And with the future of the encyclopedia imperiled, knowledge itself could melt away, leaving us, like the facts and information we seek, ever more isolated.
Andrew Gyory is editor in chief at Facts On File and the author of Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act.