Sears head and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald saved the Britannica from financial difficulties twice. Two years after the end of the war, in 1920, Sears bought the rights outright to save Britannica from bankruptcy the Encyclopaedia’s mission of disseminating knowledge fit in with the philanthropic beliefs of Sears’s head, Julius Rosenwald, who also founded the Museum of Science and Industry and helped establish schools for African American children in the South. started to sell the volumes through its extensive mail-order retail network. The city’s involvement with the Encyclopaedia began during World War I, when the Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck & Co. Beyond its acclaimed institutions of higher learning, their libraries and presses, and its museums, the city is also home to the respected Newberry Library, the American Library Association, the Great Books Foundation, and two of the most popular encyclopedias of the last few centuries: World Book, which celebrated its one hundredth anniversary last year, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which published its first volume 250 years ago.Īlthough the Britannica is now completely digital and has been supplanted by Wikipedia as the world’s go-to source for information, it was once a revered reference and proud emblem of the American middle class – and its success as an aspirational status symbol was in many ways a result of Chicago figures and institutions. The current edition features 65,000 articles written by 4,000 contributors, including Ian Rankin, Desmond Tutu and Bill Clinton.Like a library, Chicago quietly houses some of the greatest sources of the world’s knowledge. Starting out as a three-volume first edition first published in 1768 and completed in 1771, the Encyclopedia Britannica began to include contributions from the likes of Walter Scott, AC Swinburne, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Leon Trotsky and Harry Houdini. ![]() The Encyclopedia Britannica has its roots in 18th-century Edinburgh, where printer Colin Macfarquhar, engraver Andrew Bell and scholar William Smellie decided to create an encyclopaedia which would be arranged alphabetically, "compiled upon a new plan in which the different Sciences and Arts are digested into distinct Treatises or Systems", with its chief purpose being "utility". ![]() "In the distant future we might do a limited edition once a decade, but there are no plans for that at the moment," added Hughes. "I don't think we would go back to print on it, although we haven't suspended print entirely – just the 32-volume set," said Hughes (the publisher's print editions of reference books for students and young children continue). It's looking like we will sell out – I imagine the remaining 800 will go very quickly."įuture editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica will be available only online, despite the popularity of the final set. ![]() "But people have grown up with it – in the early days it was the mark of an educated household – and they wanted to get their hands on a piece of history, we think. "It's sold much quicker than normal – we haven't seen sales like this for a long time," said Hughes. When the announcement was made on 13 March that it would be the final set, there were 4,000 copies remaining, and that figure has now dropped to just 800, with expectations high of an imminent sell-out. There were 12,000 copies printed of the 32-volume 2010 edition, which fills almost a metre and a half on book shelves and weighs 62 kilogrammes.
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