In an age before Google, parents pinned hopes for their children’s future onto promises made on their doorsteps by encyclopedia salesmen.
Denis Boyles, the author of a history of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, recalled recently for a Tribune reporter the encyclopedias of his youth: “I was taught in high school that you started (a report) with the Britannica to find out how much you didn’t know,” he said. “Then you (turned to the more accessible) Americana, World Book and Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias until you could fathom at least enough to get (writing).”
Two of those are based in Chicago: The Encyclopaedia Britannica and the World Book, which is currently celebrating its 100th anniversary.
The Britannica has always been the more scholarly. In the 1920s, it had entries written by Sigmund Freud (psychoanalysis), Albert Einstein (space-time) and Harry Houdini (conjuring).
The World Book is the more accessible. Novelist Jane Smiley told the Tribune in 2014 about her first encounter with an encyclopedia, a present from her mother.
“The best gift she ever gave me was the World Book Encyclopedia, sold to her, of course, by a traveling salesman and no doubt bought on credit,” Smiley said. “I was 7. I read the 20 volumes religiously, and not just the articles on horses and dogs.”
In 1990, the Tribune noted that World Book annually monitored what topics were most researched by students in grades 3 through 12. The top 10 that year: dog, cat, snake, horse, president of the United States, bird, fish, flag, baseball and dinosaur.
World Book was founded by Chicago publishers J. H. Hansen and John Bellow, who realized that existing encyclopedias were off-putting to young readers. In 1915, they enlisted the help of Michael Vincent O'Shea, a University of Wisconsin at Madison professor, who believed that an accurate and informative encyclopedia could also be engaging and easy to read. As editor-in-chief, O’Shea reworked the project. Entries were accompanied by thousands of illustrations designed to capture a child’s imagination.
The formula was instantly successful: The eight-volume edition of 1917 was enlarged to 10 volumes the following year. In 1919, World Book was bought by publisher W.F. Quarrie & Co. Quarrie’s contribution was to establish an editorial board to align the entries with what students studied, from kindergarten through high school.
But whether the entries were aimed at highbrow readers or schoolchildren, the questions an encyclopedia’s publisher had to tackle were the same: How could you keep its entries up to date and accurate? How could you make the sight of a set of its volumes on a family’s bookshelves emblematic of membership in the American middle class?
Richard Bready, a senior researcher at World Book, explained its fact-checking process in 1987, when the Tribune proclaimed it “the world’s best-selling encyclopedia, with 40 percent of the market.”
After a writer submits a draft, Bready noted, a researcher “covers the article with chicken tracks, going over it letter by letter to make sure that, for everything it says, we have sources we looked at, or talked to, that we consider reliable.”
It isn’t easy. To check on the number of battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor, Bready looked at two books by Samuel Eliot Morison. In one, the celebrated naval historian correctly said it was four, in the other Morison claimed it was five.
“We found in essence,” Bready noted, “that he had sunk a battleship all by himself.”
Curiously that devotion to truth came late to the making of encyclopedias.
The “Natural History” of Pliny the Elder is generally considered the first encyclopedia.
The 1st century Roman writer aimed to gather together all human knowledge. We’re told that the only time his nose wasn’t buried in a book was when he was taking a bath. But having invested so much energy in the project, he was loath to discard a good story. He took magic and mythological beasts at face value.
At the other end of the encyclopedia’s evolution is Wikipedia. It asks users to be its fact-checkers. But when writer Philip Roth spotted an error in an entry about his novel “The Human Stain,” his correction was at first rejected. He wasn’t considered an expert on the subject.
In between Pliny and Wikipedia came the Golden Age of Encyclopedia Publishing. It began when a group of French intellectuals authored the Encyclopedie of 1751. It was a declaration of war on superstition and ignorance. Its 17 volumes were touted as having “the power to change men’s way of thinking.”
The English-language equivalent is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, originally published in Great Britain.
The Tribune was initially wary of it, noting in 1888: “It doubtless tells all that Englishmen care to know about America and its institutions, but to an American its treatment of these subjects seems meager, inadequate, unsympathetic, and slow.”
Eventually, American investors bought Britannica and its offices were moved to New York. The Britannica’s Chicago connection came in 1920 when it was purchased by Sears, Roebuck & Co. chief Julius Rosenwald.
“Rosenwald's backing allowed the encyclopedia to publish its 14th edition in 1929,” reports another tome of knowledge, the “Encyclopedia of Chicago.” “Three years later, Elkan H. ‘Buck’ Powell, a University of Chicago graduate and Sears employee, took charge of Britannica, and the general offices moved to Chicago.”
By 1894, the Tribune had changed its mind, noting: “There is but one Bible for Christians, one Talmud for Hebrews, one Koran for Mohammedans, and but one Encyclopedia Britannica for the people who speak and read the English language and who turn to it as the one compressive all-inclusive and authoritarian epitome of human knowledge in all its branches.”
Why the change of heart? The paper was then selling the Britannica “at the unheard of rate of only 10 cents a day,” and asking readers: “Can you afford to miss this grand opportunity?”
Another newspaper publisher saw an opportunity in encyclopedias too. In 1945, Marshall Field III, publisher of what became the Chicago Sun-Times, bought World Book. Field added another of World Book’s signature features: a Year Book of updates, with which encyclopedia purchasers could keep their sets up to date.
In 1978, World Book was sold to Scott Fetzer Co., an Ohio conglomerate that kept the encyclopedia company based in Chicago. By then, it had a sales force of 60,000 and vastly outsold Britannica.
Funk & Wagnalls was different — it was marketed in supermarkets. Four volumes at a time would be available at Jewel and other grocers. By regularly including the latest volume on the shopping list, a family could build up a set with which the children could research their homework assignments.
Like Pliny, the Funk & Wagnalls founder believed in things of which others are skeptical. The Rev. Isaac K. Funk was convinced that the dead could communicate with the living, a view he expounded on in his 1907 book, “The Psychic Riddle.”
His encyclopedia is now dead, though vestiges survive in online publishers’ reference works. Perhaps that points to the encyclopedia’s future. World Book and Britannica each now focus more than ever on their digital products and publications. Britannica published its last print edition in 2010.
Yet as schoolkids write their reports these days with one eye on a paperless encyclopedia, they miss the special joy that Jane Smiley experienced.
It’s hard to curl up with a computer as she did with the World Book.
“I loved the pictures,” she recalled. “I would open it flat and lie there on my stomach, exploring one new world after another.”
rgrossman@chicagotribune.com