Circle of Learning

If you had to invent the Encyclopaedia Britannica today, would you do it the same way? That was the question posed in 1957 to members of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Now--17 years and $32 million later--the editors have disclosed their answer: No. The new 15th edition, which was unveiled at a press conference in Manhattan this week, is heralded as "the first new idea in encyclopaedia making in 200 years."

The editors decided that an alphabetical collection of unrelated articles --the traditional Britannica format since the first edition in 1771--was no longer adequate in an era of explosive growth in human knowledge. What was needed was a completely new design that would permit continual additions and changes, and at the same time satisfy more effectively the three separate needs of Britannica users: 1) to get at the facts, or a single fact, quickly and easily; 2) to discover the meaning of the facts; and 3) to review entire fields of learning.

Three Parts. The solution was provided by Britannica Editor and Author Mortimer Adler, founder-president of the Institute for Philosophical Research, a man who has never been intimidated by the task of organizing and compiling the total of human knowledge. His 1952 Syntopticon, an index to EB's 54-volume Great Books of the Western World, catalogued everything of note the authors had to say about the 102 Great Ideas of Western Civilization. Adler divided the encyclopaedia into three separate parts, which he named with the pseudoclassic neologisms: the Propaedia, Macropaedia and Micropaedia (meaning before, great and little learning)--and called the complete 30-volume set Britannica 3.

The unique part of Britannica 3 (estimated price: $550) is the Propaedia, a one-volume "outline of the whole of human knowledge" that serves as a framework and guide for the material in the other 29 volumes. The concept of the Propaedia stems from the Greek words that constitute the term encyclopaedia: the whole circle (or complete system) of learning. Adler describes the content of the Propaedia as a "circle of learning" that is divided, pie-like, into ten major segments: matter and energy, the earth, life on earth, human life, human society, art, technology, religion, the history of mankind, the branches of knowledge. Within the ten segments there are 42 divisions, 189 sections and 15,000 separate subjects--each of which is accompanied by references to the 19-volume Macropaedia, a browser's paradise of 4,207 major articles, biographies and geographical descriptions in the traditional alphabetical order. Thus, if a reader wants a detailed description of icebergs, for example, he looks in the Propaedia under Part Two--The Earth; then under Division II--The Earth's envelope: its atmosphere and hydrosphere. Next, beneath the listing for "The distribution of water in the hydrosphere," he finds the heading "Ice." Finally he comes to "Icebergs and pack ice," with a reference to the appropriate section of a lengthy article in Volume 9 of the Macropaedia.

For a more direct route to a thumbnail sketch of icebergs, the reader merely finds the listing "Icebergs" in the alphabetized ten-volume Micropaedia, a fact finder's treasury of 102,214 short articles, none more than 750 words long and most much shorter. Because all the information for the Micropaedia is stored in computers, it will be easier to update than material in earlier editions.

Assembling, editing and checking the 43 million words in the 30 volumes of Britannica 3 (v. 37 million words in 24 volumes of the 14th edition) was a task that Editor Warren E. Preece compares to fighting a war. There was total concentration, joint commitment and excitement, he says, "but I don't know anyone who was intimately involved who would knowingly do it again." The staff of 360 was driven relentlessly--some were reduced to tears--by the deadline-conscious Adler. A few scholars balked at the restraints on their freedom to write as they chose. "It sounds a little brassy," says Preece, "but in every case, we told the contributors exactly what we wanted them to cover."

Preece and Executive Editor Philip W. Goetz personally plowed through 200,000 words of text a week. Goetz once struggled home with a briefcase full of articles on analgesics, Scipio, polymorphic biology, Canute the Great, Ethiopian culture and someone named 'Umar al-Hajj, "whoever the hell that was. * "-- Curiously, neither editor claims to be a walking encyclopaedia. "To be a good editor, you've got to have a mind like a sieve," insists Preece. Adds Goetz: "I can talk for two minutes on any subject under the sun, but the third minute is usually a disaster."

Literate Articles. Macropaedia readers will still find the literate, initialed articles by world-renowned experts that are the Britannica's hallmark --but, say the editors, without the overlaps, omissions and inconsistencies of earlier editions. There is Arnold Toynbee on Julius Caesar and leading American Catholic Theologian John L. McKenzie on Roman Catholicism, English Embryologist Sir Gavin de Beer on evolution and Carl Sagan (see BOOKS) on the planets and extraterrestrial life. The late Sir Tyrone Guthrie writes about theater, Anthony Burgess examines the novel, Alan Lomax discusses singing, and Barnaby Conrad summarizes bullfighting. Although more than half the scholarly contributors are American or English, the authors come from a total of 131 countries. "A.S.A.," who writes on Mecca, for example, is Saudi Arabian Geographer Ass'ad Sulaiman Abdo.

The man who made Britannica 3 possible was onetime University of Chicago vice president (1937-45) and U.S. Senator (1949-53) William Benton, Encyclopaedia Britannica's majority stockholder and publisher for 30 years. Despite his pride in the current, 14th edition (first published in 1929), he supported his editors' decision to produce a totally new encyclopaedia and agreed to finance the venture. Benton was not on hand for the unveiling; he died last March, two weeks before his 73rd birthday. But in Britannica 3, he has a monument as impressive as any man could want.

*A West African Muslim leader (1797-1864).

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