Nineteenth-century Encyclopaedias

Factual Questions
1

Does anyone know if any efforts are underway to make any of the old nineteenth-century encyclopaedias available on the internet?

If you have read any of them, you will know that the articles were absolutely packed with information. Each one was more like a monograph than the current style of short, ‘dictionary-style’, entry; typically hundreds of pages long (a single article, ‘Greece’, in Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, was 3,668 pages long), with a level of discourse and erudition that is impossible to imagine in one of today’s ‘dumbed-down’ general encyclopaedias.

Of course, the reason for the ‘dumbing down’ is straightforward: a different target readership. The great nineteenth-century encyclopaedias were written by scholars for scholars, while today’s versions were primarily written for students who need to write essays.

One thing that I learned was the dominance of German as the language of scholarship at that time. All of the largest encyclopaedias were in that language, and they were huge. The Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, mentioned above, consisted of 168 volumes, while the Oekonomisch-technologische Encyklopädie had 242 (!) volumes. Compare that to the greatest English-language encyclopaedia, the Encyclopœdia Britannica, 10th edition, with 35 volumes.

By my (admittedly preliminary) count, the nineteenth century produced at least 13 great encyclopaedias, each at least equal to the Encyclopœdia Britannica, and another half-dozen just one step below that level. In addition, there were literally scores of more specialised encyclopaedias, of near-equal size, covering a particular field, i.e. biography, music, architecture, botany, religion, etc.

Now all of these works are more than 75 years old, and thus are in the public domain. With current scanning and character-recognition technology, it seems to me to be a straighforward task to convert them into machine-readable form, and possibly post them on the internet. If there are any roadblocks, they would be more institutional in origin (getting permission from the libraries that hold them) than technical.

The benefits would be enormous. There are vast amounts of information which are only available in those encyclopaedias, even today being used by researchers, which could be lost due to fire, mildew, insects, etc.

So is there any effort being made along these lines? Preferably with the intention of free access to the contents via the internet; if I suddenly won a large lottery, that would probably be where I would put the bulk of my money.

Bill

2

… I don’t know. It would be a good thing IMO.

This type of comment alwas makes me wonder what things were lost to the world when the Great library at Alexandria was burned. IMO, that was probably the greatest loss this world has had so far.

3

Oh yes!
My campus library has tons of old books-the oldest one I found was a reference book from 1903! It was so neat-it was about world rulers. The Obrenoviches were STILL ruling Serbia, according to the text (they were slaughtered in late 1903!)

I love looking at the old books.

4

It’s strange that the three greatest losses of knowledge in the world’s history were all caused by deliberate fires: the Library of Alexandra, the first Chinese emperor ordering the burning of all books, and the burning of all the Mesoamerican literature by the Spaniards.

Bill

5

It sounds as though you are thinking along the same lines as Project Gutenberg http://promo.net/pg/history.html#theselection

I don’t get the impression that they have quite got to the point of having all those worthy tomes available, but if anyone has a plan to do it, I think these are the people. Watch out - they want volunteers to help in the Great Work, so you might have a busy year (or life) ahead!

6

I am aware of Project Gutenberg, and wholeheartedly support their position against the insane copyright laws currently in the books.

However, I have several problems with several aspects of their (admirable) project:

First, their work is done by volunteers at home, typing in the books by hand and sending the results to be posted with little or no error-checking. This results in extremely buggy results, with typos, missing or duplicated words, and even missing lines.

Second, the final files are posted in a ‘plain-vanilla’ format with no bolding, italics, larger or smaller font sizes, superscripts or subscripts, kerning, etc. The raw files that are produced are basically unreadable as is, and are seemingly intended to be processed further by an intermediary before presentation to the final user. However, the very high error rate means that this intermediary cannot trust the text as given, and may as well go to the original paper text.

A better procedure (to me) would be for Project Gutenberg to raise the money for one or more good scanners, with computer and character-recognition software, and start again from scratch, this time including all of the above type characteristics in the final text.

A handful of volunteers at the major research libraries are all that would be needed; my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that a single scanner working 5 days a week could produce at least 100,000 pages of accurately transcribed text every 50 weeks. (That is at 1 page per minute, 50 minutes per hour, 8 hours a day. I suspect that in the near future, the actual rate could be much higher.)

Bill

7

Bill, I’m curious. I’ve got the 1880 Century Cyclopedia (which was Chambers’ with some American stuff thrown in). Would you consider that “great”, or “just one step below” or lesser?

8

The 13 nineteenth-century encyclopaedias that I consider ‘great’ are the following:

Oekonomisch-technologische Encyklopädie - Krünitz (242 vols., 1773-1858)
Encyclopédie méthodique - (1782-1832)
Konversations-Lexikon - Brockhaus (1796-1811)
New Cyclopædia - Rees (45 vols., 1802-20)
*Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste[i/i] - Ersch, Gruber (168 vols., 1818-90; suppl., 1914)
Encyclopédie du XIXeme siècle - (75 vols., 1837-59)
Konversations-Lexikon - Meyer (37 vols., 1840-52)
Enciclopedia moderna - Mellados (34 vols., 3 charts, 1848-51)
Encyclopédie moderne, 2nd ed. - (30 vols., 12 suppl., 2 atlas, 1856-62)
Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXème siècle - Larousse (17 vols., 1865-88)
Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th ed. - (24 vols., index, 1875-89, 11 suppl., index, atlas, 1902-03)
La Grande Encyclopédie - Bertholet (31 vols., 1885-1903)
Diccionanno enciclopedia Hispano-Amenicano - Montaner y Simon (25 vols., 1887-99)

Chambers’ Encyclopædia (10 vols., 1860-68) was indeed of good quality, but it was basically an abridged translation of Meyer’s Konversation-Lexikon, and hence I did not include it in the above list.

As to where I drew the line, I admit that it was fairly arbitrary: I did not include the Russian Entsiklopedichesky slovar, since the most famous edition was in the twentieth century. I will say that 13 is a minimum number; all of the works in the list above are in, and there may well be others that I would include if I knew more about them.

Bill

P.S. Even two encyclopaedias with the same number of pages can have quite different numbers of volumes. The earlier the work, the thicker the paper was, and hence the fewer pages per volume, and also the average thickness of the volumes in each set varied, depending upon the views of the editor and publisher. So don’t give too much weight to the number of volumes.

9

preview, preview, preview :frowning:

10

I note that Alan Stevenson, uncle of Robert Louis Stevenson, and scion of the great Scottish engineering family that built some of the most remarkable lighthouses in the world, wrote the extensive entry on lighthouses for Chamber’s Encyclopædia.

http://www.pathfinder.com/photo/archive/things/wave.htm

11

This is from Encyclopædia Britannica Online

I would add the article on ‘guerrilla warfare’ by Lawrence ‘of Arabia’ in the Britannica, 12th ed…

Chambers’ Encyclopædia does have a lot of original material in it; however, much (most) of it is from Meyer’s Konversations-Lexikon.

Bill