A New Britannica

Drop in any evening at a literary pub in Edinburgh and you are likely to find William Smellie, who will expansively declare that he was the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1771. And he is apt to say of his achievement: "I wrote most of it, my lad, and snipped out from books enough material for the printer. With pastepot and scissors I composed it." But as of now, Editor Smellie is finished at the Britannica. Because of the encyclopedia's success, both in Britain and the Colonies, the owners wanted all three volumes expanded according to a plan with which he disagreed. He refused; the publishers insisted; he bowed out.

The idea for the Britannica was conceived back in 1768 by Colin Macfarquhar, a young (then 22) bookseller and printer. Needing capital, he enlisted the aid of Andrew Bell, some 20 years his senior, who had begun his career engraving dog collars and progressed to the eminence of Edinburgh's leading printer-engraver. Bell stands only 4 feet 6 inches tall and has a huge nose, but he disarms the mockery of others by making mock of himself. He mounts his giant horse with the aid of a ladder, carrying with him a papier-mache nose to enlarge his own.

For an editor, this pair of entrepreneurs sought out Smellie, who was only 28 but had an expertise ranging from Terence to botany. Together with Macfarquhar, he worked out a new plan for an encyclopedia. He would follow the scheme most recently used by French Encyclopedist Denis Diderot--providing long articles on the arts and sciences, but without Diderot's polemical tone; and he would combine these long articles with brief alphabetical listings, as in the current British encyclopedias.

Smellie stipulated that the prime aim should be "utility," so that the encyclopedia has become in large measure a reference book on how to do useful things. There are, for instance, seven pages of instruction on how to build a chimney (under "Smoke"). Smellie himself undertook to write the treatises on 15 major sciences (out of the 45 listed), and his style has a charm of its own. Sample: "The Cat... Of all domestic animals, the character of the cat is the most equivocal and suspicious."

As his publishers pressed him to finish his work, some of his later offerings became more and more cursory. The entry on "Sex," for instance, dismisses it as "something in the body which distinguishes male from female." Yet the persevering reader will discover, under the large heading of "Anatomy," sex organs of both the human male and female described at length and illustrated in five admirable engravings by Bell. In the 43 pages devoted to "Midwifery," the text could instruct the most distraught young husband snowbound in the country. All of it is illustrated by Bell's drawings--drawings so explicit that many subscribers have clipped them out of their volumes and destroyed them. Equally explicit is a drawing of Noah's ark, accompanied by elaborate calculations on the space needed for the animals' food. The date of the Flood is firmly fixed at 2351 B.C.

With success at their back, the Britannica's proprietors now want to produce a new edition. Major articles are to be vastly expanded, a substantial amount of history added. Most radically, there will be an account of the lives of the most eminent persons from the earliest ages down to the present tunes.

The inclusion of biography was demanded by the partners' newest and biggest patron, the Duke of Buccleuch. This is contrary to the whole tradition of encyclopedias of the "arts and sciences." Smellie refused to do it, perhaps partly because he felt the duke was anxious to get his own name into print. The proprietors' choice then fell upon one James Tytler, 29, whom a local poet has described as "an obscure, tippling, but extraordinary body" who "drudges about Edinburgh as a common printer with leaky shoes and a skylighted hat."

The choice is not so odd as it seems. The son of a minister, Tytler worked his way through medical school. He has tried out as both surgeon and apothecary, and failed in several tries and in several places. When the Britannica proprietors found him, he was in Holyrood House, that sanctuary for debtors, working at a press of his own design and printing his essays on religion and politics. As a man who may not bestride but at least straddles the worlds of both scientific and religious thought--though admittedly master of neither--he may be ideally suited for the job.

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