Book People Archive

Re: Encylopedic Mystery

At 01/23/01 08:44 PM -0500, Charles P. Hall wrote:
>I inherited an 1899 encyclopedia ("World Wide Encylopedia and
>Gazetteer"), published in 1899 by the Christian Herald and Werner House.
>It consists of 12 volumes.
>
>Here's the mystery, Volumes I-VIII cover A-ZYMOTIC, Volumes IX-XII cover
>AACHEN-ZYLONITE. That's right, the alphabet starts over in the middle of
>the series.
>
>As near as I can tell there are very few articles in common. Those that
>do show up in both are extremely short in the first set, much longer in
>the second. But most articles are not duplicated.
>
>Bindings, print style and copyright pages are all the same. Can anyone
>explain what was going on back then? I've been pondering it for years
>and have never found any pattern to explain which articles are in which
>section!

Encyclopedias are such a big job to compile and edit, that they
used to be issued by subscription. Volume 1 would come out, then
some number of months later (or a year or two) volume 2, etc.
You can see by the time one gets to "Z", "A" is way out of date.
So, what you do is you start completely over for the next edition.

Occasionally a different approach would be taken; the most famous
example in English is the American Edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. This was actually a reprint of the Ninth Edition
(24 volumes) with a 5-volume "American Supplement". The supplement
also went from A to Z, but had more recent information and more
articles about the USA.

It sounds to me like you have an encyclopedia with a later supplement.
If it is a translation of the German one, as suggested by Anders
Thulin, that would explain why all the dates are the same -- it
would be the date the English translation was published.

By the way, when the Eleventh Edition of the EB was issued in 1910,
they made a big thing of how it was all written, edited, printed
and distributed together. However, the tradition was not dead. In
1922, rather than rewrite the whole thing, they reprinted the Eleventh
with 3 "New Volumes" and called it the Twelfth. Among other things of
course it had a lot of articles about the Great War including long
articles about major battles. Then in 1926 they reprinted the Eleventh
again with 3 DIFFERENT "New Volumes" and called it the Thirteenth.

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Michael Oltz, Cornell University