When I was trying to grow up, encyclopedia salesmen sometimes came to the house. It was an odd business, selling encyclopedias from door to door, and “The encyclopedia man” became a kind of joke, spoofed by Monty Python among others. The sales pitch was that an encyclopedia in the home would guarantee that your child would grow up both intelligent and knowledgeable, and obviously it worked for me.
My parents had two different sets in multiple volumes, one for adults and one, much less interesting, for children. You can still find printed encyclopedias gathering dust in public libraries, but rarely on family bookshelves – the Internet has seen to that. I invite you to consider whether your home Internet connection, however super-fast, will guarantee that your child will grow up both intelligent and knowledgeable.
The great thing about an encyclopedia in book form, and especially a big one like Britannica or Americana, is that you can read it, explore it and get lost in it. One thing leads to another, and another and another. You may start by looking up dragons and end up reading about speculative fiction or Italian opera. I know because it happened to me. Any encyclopedia confronts you, in heavy physical form, with all the things you don’t know, and, just by being there, challenges you to enlighten your ignorance. You learn from an encyclopedia, but you only get answers from a search engine.
This is a significant date in the history of encyclopedias. On July 31 in 1784, 239 years ago, Denis Diderot breathed his last. Diderot is not the most famous name in intellectual history, although everybody knows Mr. Google. But whenever we use an online search engine to answer one of our questions we benefit from the genius, bravery and determination of Monsieur Diderot.
His idea, which was as simple as it was revolutionary, was to gather all the knowledge in the world in a systematic way so that anybody could find information about anything. In other words, Diderot invented the encyclopedia, and created the very first encyclopedia himself.
It was a project on a heroic scale, completed in 1772 and filling 27 large volumes containing 75,000 entries, half of them written in hand by Diderot himself. It was not at all popular among the rich and powerful of the time, because knowledge never is. If, as the cliché says, knowledge is power, then ignorance is powerlessness. Once people start learning and thinking for themselves, who knows what might happen?
Some encyclopedia entries were so radical that the entire book was banned for a while as a threat to natural ignorance. But now it is treated as an intellectual monument, and the French state honored the author in his tricentennial year.
Intellectual giants like Goethe, Nietzsche, Hegel and Freud all admired Diderot, not only for his massive encyclopedia but for his subversive satirical writing. He was a man with a mission, to promote knowledge in all its forms without prejudice and without censorship, which is what got him into trouble.
Diderot lived in a time of great political turmoil, public ignorance, and competing irrational belief systems. How things have changed. The sum of human knowledge is infinitely greater than it was in the 1700s and would fill thousands of encyclopedias. Diderot believed passionately that the more we knew the more rational and civilized we would become. Now essentially, we know everything. I can hardly wait.
Note: The best biography of Diderot is Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely by Andrew S. Curran (2019)
