My counting was imprecise. I have a reproduction of the first edition, which is three volumes. I have a complete eleventh and a complete thirteenth which, as you say, is the eleventh plus three volumes, but bound and typeset differently. This latest thing I bought was published by the Werner Company of New York, Akron and Chicago in 1904. It's called "The New American Supplement to the New Werner Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica...Twentieth Century Edition." The text is available here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=SgYEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA9&lpg=PA9&dq=new +werner+edition+encyclopedia +britannica&source=web&ots=HFdOhyM0Vc&sig=5lUFBwzAe3Pe6q14c_ncR1mj6Ts#PP A11,M1
I was tempted by the price and by the wonderful leather binding and an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson and being away from home, with room in my car's trunk.
Exactly what it is, I have yet to discover.I also own a book I can't lay my hand on at the moment, written by someone who set out to read the whole of Britannica through, starting at "A," and Harvey Einbinder, "The Myth of Britannica," which is a critique of errors. This error-finding project so appealed to the original owner of my copy of Einbinder that he inserted, "Scotchmen" for "Scotsmen" in the following sentence, "In 1768 the Encyclopedia Britannica was quietly launched in Endinburgh by two enterprising Scotsmen, Andrew Bell and Colin Macfarquhar."
It is Einbinder's view that the motive for Britannica was not as Monsieur Speranza suggests, an attempt to mimic Diderot's *intellectual* achievement, but rather--plus ca change--to make a groat or two by copying something that seemed to be selling well. Thus an engraver, a printer and William Smellie cobbled together the first edition. Other writers take a view closer to JLS.
It should be pointed out that the English were there first. John Harris published Lexicon technicum in 1704 and the much more famous Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia appeared in 1728. Diderot didn't issue his prospectus until 1750; the first volume came out a year later.
Einbinder says that "Yung Lo Ta Tien," which was compiled at the order of Ming emperor Yung Lo predates them all by approximately three hundred years. It's fifteen times larger than Britannica.
If anyone knows what this Werner edition's history is, I'd love to hear. David Ritchie, Portland, Oregon ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
