And most of these are among the 14 million words of the Micropaedia, where they appear as a jury-rigged abridgement of articles rendered down by a staff of sixty from late revisions of the infamous 14th edition, which even Britannica promoters concede was a lackluster set of books. About 10 percent of the set’s 43 million words are admittedly lifted from the previous edition. This claim is usually hedged, typically by the figure 90 percent new. Sweeping claims have been made for Britannica 3, and not the least of them that it is entirely new, rebuilt from ground zero. It has proved to be grotesquely insufficient as an index, radically constricting the utility of the Macropaedia, which has come in practice to surpass my expectations for it. (It and the Propaedia both serve as gateways to the Macropaedia, but take no notice of each other.) It is called the Micropaedia, for “little knowledge,” and little knowledge is what it provides. I was least anxious regarding the merits of the ready-reference, an illustrated index of 102,000 entries, some as long as 750 words, which identifies and abstracts every article in the Macropaedia. The Propaedia was designed to educate the set’s owners, as its other parts were meant to inform them, and while it was being boosted as a “university without walls,” I suspected that it would not be much used. I was also suspicious that his Propaedia, an elaborate table of the Macropaedia’s contents, topically arranged and putatively linking without seams all things to all things, all ideas to all ideas, was a folly. I was then primarily apprehensive about the section Greekified Macropaedia (for “great knowledge”) by Mortimer Adler, the set’s principal architect. I had realized when I wrote my own appreciation of the reference set that it could demonstrate its adequacy only with time. Harvey Einbinder, the author of The Myth of the Britannica, which had savagely impugned the accuracy and utility of the previous edition, thumped the tub for Britannica 3, “wholeheartedly” commending it in Bookletter (September 16, 1974), and writing that it “maintains a standard of excellence that renders other adult encyclopedias obsolete,” judging it “unmatched for convenience, freshness, and accuracy.” I discovered flaws of design and execution, and characterized the encyclopedia’s style as generally dry and perfunctory, but I concluded that Britannica 3 (named for its tripartite division) was a “most desirable reference and learning tool.”Įarly reviewers of the set were even less reserved in their benedictions, taking on faith the rapturous esteem in which the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was held by its architects, promoters, and salespeople. During the few weeks before that article’s deadline I used and reviewed Britannica 3’s controversial outline of knowledge (one volume), illustrated ready reference and index (ten volumes), and alphabetical collection of long articles (nineteen volumes). The June 1974 Atlantic carried “Britannica 3, History of,” my account of the quarter-century of intellectual and economic turmoil which brought to fruit an utterly new and hugely expensive ($32 million to produce) reference work.
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