The kinds of encyclopaedias

Influence of printing

It is now possible to see, in the past 2,000 years of encyclopaedia production, the existence of a pattern closely related to the changing social needs of each age. The outstanding circumstances that governed the policy and production of encyclopaedias for the first 15 centuries were that comparatively few people were able to read and, stemming partly from this and partly from the cost of materials and workmanship, that copies of any lengthy work were very expensive. Only when printing was introduced into Europe did the cost of production drop by any large amount; this development in turn helped to stimulate the growth of readership. A notable feature at the time of the early printing press was the sudden growth in the popularity of some of the older encyclopaedias as a result of the tendency to ensure a ready market by printing works of which many manuscript copies were in circulation.

During the first 16 centuries of their publication the majority of encyclopaedias comprised great anthologies of the most significant writings on as many subjects as possible. The arrangement of these excerpts was constantly varying according to the individual compiler’s concept of the hierarchies of human knowledge; some of these classification systems were more suitable than others, but none was completely successful in meeting the tastes of the reading public, because there was no general agreement on the essential order of ideas. Although the compiler exercised considerable latitude in choosing items to include in the encyclopaedia, comment was often restricted to a minimum, so that the reader was free to form an opinion of what was offered. In addition, because the compiler selected material from what had already been written, the reader was referred to the past, and, although he or she could enjoy the heritage of the preceding cultures, the reader was not being put in touch with as much of the contemporary world as might have been desired.

About the 10th or 11th century a new type of encyclopaedia began to emerge, probably stimulated by the growing number of language dictionaries that, starting well before printing was used, grew ever more numerous once they could be produced. Many early dictionaries were little more than enlarged glossaries, but from the time of Suidas onward there began to appear a type of dictionary—now called encyclopaedic—that added to the definition and etymology of a word a description of the functions of the thing or idea it named. In some dictionaries, such as those of the Estiennes, a French family of book dealers and printers, this description might in some cases be of considerable length. Thus, the compilers of the new form of encyclopaedia that emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries inevitably thought in terms of arranging their entries in alphabetical order because the dictionaries had already familiarized the reading public with this system.

The last half of the 18th century, by way of the Enlightenment, brought such an upheaval in the human concept of the world that the time was ripe for further experiments in the form of the encyclopaedia. The French encyclopaedists Diderot and d’Alembert and their band of contributors broke no new ground in the physical format and arrangement of the encyclopaedia, but their work inspired the intelligentsia of other nations to produce really good encyclopaedias of their own. It is no coincidence that both the German Brockhaus and the Scottish Britannica appeared with policies so different from all that had gone before that no publisher of any new encyclopaedia could afford to ignore their new patterns. Their formulas were so good that the modern encyclopaedia is simply a vastly improved elaboration of their method of arrangement and organization. The compilers of both encyclopaedias had taken the best ideas from the anthologies and miscellanies of the early period of encyclopaedia making and from the later stage of encyclopaedic dictionaries. Realizing that the reading public would not tolerate the omission of some subjects and the unequal treatment of others, they prepared works in which at least a few lines were devoted to almost every conceivable topic, and for more important subjects a full account was provided, written by an expert, if possible.

Three stages of development

The three periods of the history of encyclopaedias—(1) to 1600, (2) 1601–1799, and (3) 1800 onward—are very unequal. They are, moreover, to a certain extent misleading, for the different forms of the encyclopaedia overlapped at each turning point for some years, and even today there are still some important survivals from the two earlier periods. One can study and compare what each of the three main types of encyclopaedia has had to offer by reading entries on the same subject in the Encyclopédie française, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961), and the 15th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The Encyclopédie française will provide one or more well-written treatises on the subject by writers of note. This is exactly what the encyclopaedias of the earliest period offered; and in both the old and the contemporary encyclopaedia the reader is left free to form an opinion after reading what the experts have to say. Webster’s, a one-volume work, of course provides much less, but it also gives much more, because it adds definitions and, often, explanatory drawings or diagrams to a concise text that tells the reader much in a very few lines. This is exactly what the encyclopaedic dictionaries of Louis Moréri, Antoine Furetière, and others were offering in the 17th and 18th centuries. Britannica’s contribution is distinct from those of the other two in that it provides a synthesis of what is known on the subject to date and attempts to assess its current position.

The encyclopaedias of the period before 1600 apparently were designed for a small group of people who had much the same educational background as well as similar interests and opportunities to pursue them. In general, these readers had a common outlook on both religious and secular matters. Moreover, although they were citizens of many different countries, they were united by their knowledge and use of Latin, the international language.

The Eastern Roman emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus tried to plant firmly in the hearts of the most worthy of his contemporaries both knowledge and experience of the past. His were troubled times, and he felt justified in using much of his enforced leisure (he came to the throne at age two in 911 but was not allowed to rule until 945) to provide for the administrators and emissaries of his court the most useful extracts from the writings of a very catholic selection of authors, including the patriarch of Constantinople John of Antioch (John Scholasticus), the Roman historian Appian, the Greek historian Polybius, the Greek philosopher Socrates, the 5th-century Byzantine historian Zosimus, and many others. One of the unexpected by-products of this industry was the preservation of a large number of writings, a service that some of the other medieval encyclopaedias also performed.

An advantage of the encyclopaedists of the first period (i.e., before 1600) was that each of them either knew or could visualize his reading public, a point that encouraged a minimum of commentary and moralizing. In a way, they were performing the duties of a personal librarian in that they drew their readers’ attention to innumerable passages that they believed might be useful to them in their work or their private lives. The possibility of achieving even more was fully appreciated: the English scholar Alexander Neckham, in his early 13th-century De naturis rerum (“On the Natures of Things”), hoped that by imparting knowledge he might help to lift or lighten the human spirit, and to this end he tried to maintain a simple and admirably clear text. Neckham’s near-contemporary Bartholomaeus Anglicus similarly set himself in his De proprietatibus rerum (“On the Characteristics of Things”) to bring to his readers’ attention the nature and properties of the things and ideas on which the early Christian Fathers and the philosophers had expatiated, but he forbore to comment on their writings, leaving his readers to form their own judgments. The anonymous compiler of the Compendium philosophiae (c. 1316; “Compendium of Philosophy”) believed the knowledge of truth to be the supreme and final perfection of humankind; thus, he never moralized on the contents of his encyclopaedia, its cumulative effect thereby being the more impressive.

Within the early period of the history of encyclopaedias, a number of stages can be distinguished that make each group of works significant in any study of the development of scholarship throughout the West. Encyclopaedias of Classical times reached their culmination in Pliny’s Historia naturalis, which was issued in the time of the Roman emperor Titus (39–81 ce). Not one of the encyclopaedias of Pliny or his predecessors paid much attention to religion; if it was discussed, the approach was antiquarian, the gods of the different nations ruled by Rome being named and described in a dispassionate spirit that reflected both the tolerance and the noninvolvement of the Romans in these matters. The emphasis instead was on government, geography, zoology, medicine, history, and practical matters. The theories of the various philosophers were outlined impartially, no indication being given of any personal preference. This objective approach adopted by the Romans in their encyclopaedias was not achieved again until the 19th century.

By the time of the Roman philosopher Boethius and the statesman Cassiodorus (c. the 5th and 6th centuries ce), the position concerning objectivity had changed. Like Pliny and the Roman statesman Cato, Cassiodorus had been an administrator, and, while his predecessors had been engaged in interpreting and epitomizing the knowledge of the ancient world for the benefit of their own people, Cassiodorus realized the necessity for providing a new interpretation of this knowledge for the Goths, the new masters of Italy. In the next 700 years the impact of Christianity brought a new phase in Western encyclopaedia making, just as the impact of Islam is clearly visible in the Arabic encyclopaedias of the same period. Although religion is not always given pride of place in the encyclopaedias of those times, it pervades the whole of their contents. Thus, Cassiodorus’s division of his encyclopaedia into two main sections—divine and human—is made even more interesting by his inclusion of cosmography, the liberal arts, and medicine in the first section. Although the compilers of the encyclopaedias of this period could envisage in theory a perfectly logical arrangement for their encyclopaedias by starting with the creation and working downward to the smallest and least significant of God’s creations, in practice they found this very difficult to apply, and the result was often only superficially scientific. Moreover, the inclusion of such topics as astrology and magic was surprisingly prevalent and only began to disappear after the publication of Liber floridus (c. 1120; “The Flowering Book”), by Lambert, a canon of Saint-Omer, a work that discarded practical matters in favour of metaphysical discussion.

The third stage in the development of encyclopaedias came with the introduction of vernacular editions, such as the Mappemonde and Li livres dou trésor, and the reflection of the impact of Greek philosophical works (in translation) in the middle of the 13th century. In this era there was an increasing number of lay encyclopaedists—e.g., Latini, Bandini, de la Torre—and the subject coverage changed to give more space and importance to the practical matters that interested the rising mercantile class. At the same time, theology no longer dominated the classification schemes. Humanism reached its full expression in the Spanish philosopher Juan Luis Vives’s De disciplinis (1531), in which all the compiler’s arguments were grounded on nature and made no appeal to religious authority. Although compositors and printers were not immune from mistakes, the printing press eliminated one of the most vexatious problems: the introduction or perpetuation of textual errors by the manuscript copyists. At the same time, the wider circulation of encyclopaedias through the unrestricted sales of printed copies brought about a situation in which the compilers could no longer envisage their reading public and accordingly adjusted their approach to their largely unknown audience.

Special interests

Most encyclopaedias have been compiled from a purely scholarly point of view and have had no particular ax to grind, though nearly all have been inhibited to a certain extent by the interests and policies of the milieu in which they appeared. There are, however, several encyclopaedias that have been planned deliberately for a special purpose. One that is unique and continues to be of the greatest value to historians is the work of the 16th-century Spanish Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, who spent much of his life in missionary work in Mexico. Sahagún was ordered to write in Nahuatl the information needed by his colleagues for the conversion of the indigenous peoples of the region. The result, the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (“General History of the Matters of New Spain”), was a magnificent record of the Aztec culture as recounted by the American Indians of south-central Mexico. The arrangement of this work, written in pictorial language as well as in Spanish, followed the familiar medieval pattern and resembled most closely that of Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Sahagún may have been familiar with a recent translation of Bartholomaeus’s encyclopaedia). Historia is one of the most remarkable encyclopaedias ever compiled.

Many of both the Arabic and Chinese classical encyclopaedias were compiled with the object of helping civil service candidates in their studies and of providing administrators with the cultural background needed for their work. Their interest to historians of the two cultures can well be understood, for their arrangement and contents throw useful light on the concepts of administration and justice (to name only two aspects) in the Chinese and Islamic worlds during the 7th to 15th centuries.

Of the Western medieval encyclopaedias, the most interesting in this respect is the De naturis rerum (c. 1228–44) of the Dominican friar Thomas de Cantimpré. His aim was that of St. Augustine: to unite in a single volume the whole of human knowledge concerning the nature of things, particularly the nature of animals, with a view toward using it as an introduction to theology.

Religion and politics were the main motives for writing encyclopaedias with a special purpose. Louis Moréri made no secret of his intention to produce an encyclopaedia that would defend the teaching and policies of the Roman Catholic Church. Antoine Furetière and Pierre Bayle, on the other hand, represented the philosophers, and their anticlerical bias was more in tune with the skeptical minds of the age. Nevertheless, there was still a strong orthodox following in France, as the long-continuing demand for the Dictionnaire universel of the Jesuit fathers of Trévoux demonstrated, and this encyclopaedia was as firmly in defense of Catholicism as the Encyclopédie was critical of it.

Diderot and d’Alembert’s encyclopaedia had originally been intended by its publisher to be no more than an adaptation of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia. The outcome was a giant reference work that criticized the government, satirized the Calvinist clergy of Geneva, championed the Enlightenment, and supported an atheistic materialism. To the more rigid members of the French establishment, the encyclopaedia was a monster. The more worldly, however, had no objection to a work whose succeeding volumes were each an audacious source of scandal.

Even the French encyclopaedist Pierre Larousse was not impartial. His finest encyclopaedia, the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIX^e siècle (1865–90; “Great Universal Dictionary of the 19th Century”), one of the most influential of the century, was deliberately anticlerical in policy. And Johann Gottfried von Herder, in the heart of Roman Catholic Germany, produced a counterweight to the Protestant Brockhaus in his Konversations-Lexikon (1853–57)—soon called, simply, Herder—which adopted a distinctive Catholic viewpoint. This excellent encyclopaedia was early recognized for its general impartiality, scholarship, and accuracy. In the long run, both Herder and Brockhaus gradually eliminated their sectarian inclinations.

Historical development of topical works

The alternative title of the 12th-century Speculum universale (“Universal Mirror”) of a French preacher, Raoul Ardent (a follower of Gilbert de La Porrée, a French theologian), was the Summa de vitiis et virtutibus (“Summa [Exposition] of Faults and Virtues”). Raoul’s intent was to provide a modern authoritative account of the Christian attitude to the world. His plan was different from that of other encyclopaedists, for he limited his work to the discussion (in this order) of theology, Christ and the redemption, the practical and ascetic life, thought, prayer, ethics, the four cardinal virtues, human conduct, and the four senses. This work could, in fact, be termed the first of the specialized, or topical, encyclopaedias.

Apart from isolated examples, and the technical encyclopaedia of Theophilus, the specialized encyclopaedia did not really make an appearance until the 18th century. The stimulus was probably provided by the increasing number of encyclopaedias that included the arts and sciences to such a point that some of them included little else. In any classified encyclopaedia the individual classes do, of course, constitute a kind of specialized encyclopaedia, but such a work is not sufficiently self-contained to stand on its own. As the boundaries of knowledge contained in encyclopaedias expanded, there were at least some attempts to produce specialized works of this kind.

Biography

The first real effort toward a specialized encyclopaedia was made in the mid-18th century, and the subject field that it treated was biography. The Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon (1750–51; “General Scholarly Lexicon”) was compiled by Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, a German biographer, and issued by Gleditsch, the publisher of both Hübner and Marperger’s work and the opponent of Zedler’s encyclopaedia. Jöcher’s work was continued by the German philologist Johann Cristoph Adelung and others and is still of value today. The field of international biography is not a simple one to tackle, and there were only two further efforts of note: J.C.F. Hoefer compiled the Nouvelle Biographie générale (1852–66; “New General Biography”), and J.F. Michaud was responsible for the Biographie universelle (1811–62; “Universal Biography”). These two great works were to a certain extent competitive, which helped to improve their coverage and content; they are still used in research libraries. After their publication, the task of recording biographical information on a universal scale reverted to the general encyclopaedias.

Chemistry, music, and philosophy

Developments in the field of specialized encyclopaedias correspond closely to other developments in the world of scholarship. It is, for example, no accident that so much attention should be paid to the subject of chemistry at a time when L.F.F. von Crell was issuing his series of abstract journals on chemistry. The English scientist and inventor William Nicholson was first in the field with his Dictionary of Chemistry (1795), published by Sir Richard Phillips (who later issued C.T. Watkin’s Portable Cyclopaedia). On this was based Andrew Ure’s Dictionary of Chemistry, which was for a long time the standard reference work on the subject in Great Britain. In 1807 the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth issued his Chemisches Wörterbuch (“Chemical Dictionary”), but a more important event was the publication of the Handbuch der theoretischen Chemie (1817–19; “Handbook of Theoretical Chemistry”) by the German scientist Leopold Gmelin, a work of such excellence that long after its first publication it still appeared in new editions from the Gmelin-Institut. Heinrich Rose, a German chemist, issued his Ausführliches Handbuch der analytischen Chemie (“Complete Handbook of Analytic Chemistry”) in 1851, and the first edition of Liebig, Poggendorff, and Wöhler’s famous Handwörterbuch der reinen und angewandten Chemie (“Handbook of Pure and Applied Chemistry”) was issued in 1837; its second edition (1856–65) was expanded to nine volumes. This work was continued by Hermann Fehling’s Neues Handwörterbuch der Chemie (1871–1930; “New Pocket Dictionary of Chemistry”). The French counterpart, Charles-Adolphe Wurtz’s Dictionnaire de chimie pure et appliquée (1869–1908; “Dictionary of Pure and Applied Chemistry”), became the standard work of its day. The Russian-born chemist Friedrich Konrad Beilstein first issued his Handbuch der organischen Chemie (“Handbook of Organic Chemistry”) in Hamburg, Ger., in 1880–83; it is the most extensive work of its kind today, comprising more than 300 volumes (and, at the end of the 20th century, two computer databases). The French chemist Edmond Frémy’s Encyclopédie chimique (“Chemical Encyclopaedia”) appeared in 1882–99, and A Dictionary of Applied Chemistry, edited by Sir Thomas Edward Thorpe, the English chemist, was first issued in 1890–93. Standard works of the 20th century include Fritz Ullmann’s Enzyklopädie der technischen Chemie (1914–23; “Encyclopaedia of Applied Chemistry”), Victor Grignard’s Traité de chimie organique (1935; “Treatise on Organic Chemistry”), Elsevier’s Encyclopaedia of Organic Chemistry (1940), the Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology (1947–56; known by the names of its principal editors as Kirk-Othmer), Waldemar Koglin’s Kurzes Handbuch der Chemie (1951; “Short Handbook of Chemistry”), and the indispensable CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, which by 2003 had run to 84 editions.

The impressive run of encyclopaedias and handbooks of chemistry over so long a period is paralleled only in the field of music, in which the Musikalisches Lexikon (1732; “Musical Lexicon”) of the German composer and music lexicographer Johann Gottfried Walther began the trend and was supplemented by the very successful Historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler (1790–92; “Historical and Biographical Lexicon of Musicians”) of the German organist and music historian Ernst Ludwig Gerber. The Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique (1835–44; “Universal Biography of Musicians and General Bibliography of Music”) was compiled by the director of the Brussels Conservatoire, the Belgian composer François-Joseph Fétis, almost coinciding with the equally voluminous Encyklopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften (“Encyclopaedia of Collected Musical Knowledge”) of Gustav Schilling, a German lexicographer and historian of music. A pupil of Mendelssohn, Hermann Mendel, founded the Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon (1870), which was completed by August Reissmann, who also edited the musicologist and composer Auguste Gathy’s Musikalisches Conversationslexikon (1871). The great Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du Conservatoire (1913–31) was begun by the French writer on music Albert Lavignac and continued by Lionel de La Laurencie, but the third part, a dictionary of names and subjects covered in the preceding parts, was never issued. Walter Willson Cobbett compiled the Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music (1929–30), and the English writer on music Sir George Grove first issued his Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1879–89; it went through five editions until a new work, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, appeared in 1980. A 29-volume second edition of the New Grove appeared in 2001 and also became available online. The German music historian Hugo Riemann compiled his standard Musik-Lexikon in 1882, and the musicologist Friedrich Blume the comprehensive Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1949–86; “Music of the Past and Present”); a second edition, by Ludwig Finscher, began publication in 1994.

The publication of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel’s Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817; “Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Knowledge”) was of more than subject importance in that it was a compendium of the author’s philosophical system in three parts: Logic, Nature, Mind. It influenced many editors of general encyclopaedias during the rest of the century. The standard work in this field was for many years the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (new ed. 1960, reprinted 1998) edited by the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin, though the publication of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967, reprinted 1996) provided a substantial work more in line with modern tastes. Other works in this area include the Centro di Studi Filosofici di Gallarate’s Enciclopedia filosofica (1957), the French philosopher André Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (“Technical and Critical Vocabulary of Philosophy”), first issued 1902–12, and the Austrian writer Rudolph Eisler’s Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (“Dictionary of Philosophical Concepts”). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998), edited by Edward Craig, was the first multivolume encyclopaedia published in the discipline in more than 30 years, and it was also made available online.

Other topics

The Architectural Publication Society began issuing its Dictionary of Architecture as early as 1852, but it took 40 years to complete. A work more modern in tone is Wasmuths Lexikon der Baukunst (1929–37; “Wasmuth’s Lexicon of Architecture”). Further material is included in the Encyclopedia of World Art (1959–68), the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (“Encyclopaedia for Antiquity and Christianity”; begun 1950), the Enciclopedia dell’arte antica, classica e orientale (1958–66; “Encyclopaedia of Ancient, Classical, and Oriental Art”), and Grove’s Dictionary of Art (1996; also online).

The informal title Pauly-Wissowa is very familiar to a great number of people. August von Pauly (1796–1845), the German Classical philologist, began issuing his Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (“Encyclopaedia of Classical Antiquities”) in 1837. The new edition was begun by another German Classical philologist, Georg Wissowa, in 1893. This enormous work on Classical studies has no equal in any part of the world, though it can be supplemented in some areas by the encyclopaedic series Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft (“Handbook of Antiquities”) begun in 1887.

The Swiss theologian Johann Jakob Herzog gave religion its first great encyclopaedia with his Real-Encyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (1854–68; “Encyclopaedia of the Protestant Theology and Church”). Philip Schaff, a Swiss-born American church historian, prepared the abridged English edition (1882–84) from which The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge stems. James Hastings, a Scottish clergyman, was responsible for no fewer than four encyclopaedic works in this field: A Dictionary of the Bible (1898–1904); A Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels (1906–08); Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1908–26); and Dictionary of the Apostolic Church (1915–18). An even more significant series is the Encyclopédie des sciences ecclésiastiques (“Encyclopaedia of the Ecclesiastical Sciences”), on which work was continuing at the turn of the 21st century. It comprises the Dictionnaire de la Bible (1907–12 and ongoing supplements), Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (1909–50), Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (1928–53), Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques (begun 1912), and Dictionnaire de droit canonique (1935–65; “Dictionary of Canon Law”). Other important works are The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–18), which has not been completely superseded by the New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (2003); the finely illustrated Enciclopedia cattolica (1948–54); Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1909–13; “Religion in the Past and Present”); and the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (1930–38; “Lexicon of Theology and the Church”). Other significant encyclopaedias of religion include The Encyclopaedia of Islam (new ed., begun 1960); the Encyclopaedia Judaica (1972); and The Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), edited by Mircea Eliade.

It was not until the 1860s that three of the most useful handbooks that were in daily use late into the 20th century began to appear. The Statesman’s Year-Book, important for its statistical and political information, began publication in 1864. In 1868 the English publisher Joseph Whitaker first issued his Whitaker’s Almanack, and the World Almanack started in the same year. The Chicago Daily News Almanac appeared from 1885 to 1946, and the Information Please Almanac began in 1947. Herder’s Staatslexikon (“Lexicon of Political Science”) was first published in 1889–97; this compendium was soon followed by the Dictionary of Political Economy (1894) by the English banker and economist Sir Robert Palgrave. In 1930–35 the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences was published; an immediate success, it is often referred to as Seligman after the name of its chief editor. The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968) did not supersede it in every respect. In a similar fashion, the Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften (1952–68; “Pocket Dictionary of the Social Sciences”) supplemented rather than superseded the standard Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, (“Pocket Dictionary of Political Science”; 4th ed., 1923–39). By the start of the 21st century, many world almanacs were published annually.

In the field of literature, if Isaac Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1791) is ruled out, the first important handbook is the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1870) by the English clergyman and schoolmaster Ebenezer Cobham Brewer (1810–97), supplemented with Brewer’s Reader’s Handbook (1879). Other important works include the Dizionario letterario Bompiani degli autori (1956–57; “Bompiani’s Literary Dictionary of Authors”), the Dizionario letterario Bompiani delle opere (1947–50; “Bompiani’s Literary Dictionary of Works”), Cassell’s Encyclopaedia of Literature (1953), the Oxford and Cambridge “companions” to various world literatures, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography (begun 1978).

In the last quarter of the 19th century, the fields of botany, engineering, and mathematics saw three major specialized encyclopaedias issued: Dictionnaire de botanique (1876–92; “Dictionary of Botany”) of the French naturalist and physician Henri Baillon, the Lexikon der gesamten Technik (1894–99; “Lexicon of Collected Technology”) of the German engineer Otto Lueger, and the Berlin Academy’s Enzyklopädie der mathematische Wissenschaften (1898–1935; “Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences”). The last was shortly followed by the important but incomplete Encyclopédie des sciences mathématiques pures et appliquées (1904–14; “Encyclopaedia of Theoretical and Applied Mathematical Sciences”).

Physics never received the degree of attention that the encyclopaedists accorded to chemistry and chemical engineering. The standard Dictionary of Applied Physics of the English physicist Sir Richard Glazebrook was first issued 1922–23. The Handbuch der Physik (“Handbook of Physics”) was issued from 1926 to 1929; the second edition (1955–84) is often referred to by the name of its editor, Siegfried Flügge. Another work is the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Physics (1961–64; and four supplements, 1966–75), edited by James Thewlis. In medicine the pioneer British Encyclopaedia of Medical Practice (1936–39) was followed by The Encyclopaedia of General Practice (1963).

Other important encyclopaedias and handbooks with their origins in the 20th century include The Encyclopedia of Photography (1949); the superbly illustrated and well-documented Enciclopedia dello spettacolo (1954–62; “Encyclopaedia of the Stage”), which includes all forms of staged entertainment; the Dictionnaire du cinéma et de la télévision (1965–71; “Dictionary of the Cinema and Television”); the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (1960; 9th ed., 2002); and the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (2nd ed., 2003).

CD-ROM encyclopaedias

The electronic medium was developed most quickly and visibly on CD-ROM by smaller encyclopaedias or those intended for younger readers. In 1985 Grolier, Inc., issued its Academic American Encyclopedia on CD-ROM. This text-only version received still illustrations in 1990, and in 1992, with the addition of audio and video, it became the New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. Multimedia enhancement had been introduced in 1989 by Compton’s MultiMedia Encyclopedia, owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Four years later the Microsoft Corporation released Microsoft Encarta Multimedia Encyclopedia, which enhanced the text of Funk & Wagnall’s New Encyclopedia with extensive graphics, audio, and video.

Larger encyclopaedias initially stressed the research potential of the electronic medium. World Book, Inc., and Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., issued the texts of their print sets on CD-ROM in 1989 and 1993, respectively. In 1994 still illustrations were added to World Book’s Information Finder, and that same year the Britannica CD was released with text supplemented by still illustrations and by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

Online encyclopaedias

In 1983 the Academic American Encyclopedia became the first encyclopaedia to be presented to a mass market online by the licensing of its text to commercial data networks, which eventually included CompuServe and Prodigy Information Service. Nine years later Compton’s Encyclopedia licensed its text to America Online, another commercial information provider. In 1994 Britannica Online was released for subscription over the Internet. In addition to the full text database and thousands of illustrations, Britannica Online served as a gateway to the World Wide Web by providing direct links to outside sources of information.

In 2001 the English-language version of Wikipedia was launched. A free, Internet-based encyclopaedia operating under an open-source management style, it had grown to two million articles by September 2007, and it—along with many versions in other languages—continues to expand rapidly.