presents
Diderot's French-language Encyclopédie was influential not only in France, but elsewhere. John Adams, who played key roles in declaring American independence and in establishing its new form of government, owned a copy of the third edition, with volumes published in 1778 and 1779. He made significant handwritten annotations (in English) in some of the volumes.
Below we list links to scans of his personal copy, with his annotations. The volumes were provided by the John Adams Library, and the scans of his volumes are hosted by the Internet Archive. We could not find a scan online of Adams' copy of volume 36. For completeness, we link instead to a scan of another copy from the same published edition.
We also list the first edition of the Encyclopédie. That listing includes a link to a website at the University of Chicago with extensive background on the Encyclopédie's production and publication.
This is a "meta-book", which stitches together separate files elsewhere on the Web as they appeared in a previously published book. It is subject to removal if someone produces an integrated edition. If that happens, The Online Books Page will point to the integrated version.