THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA

BY JUBILEE P. REID

Original Publish Date: July 22, 2023

On a shelf in the education exhibit at the McMinn County Living Heritage Museum is a set of worn, leather-bound books measuring 11 inches tall, 3 inches thick, and 8.5 inches wide. These books, dating from 1878, are twenty of the original twenty-five volume, 9th Edition Encyclopedia Britannica. First published in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1768, the Encyclopædia Britannica is the oldest English-language general encyclopedia. Founded by printer Colin Macfarquhar (1745? – 1793) and engraver Andrew Bell (1726 – 1809), they were published with the help of editor William Smellie. The Encyclopedia was owned by multiple British associations until 1901 when it was purchased by American investors and relocated to New York City.

The first seven editions of the now famous encyclopedia were sold locally and throughout the United Kingdom. The 8th edition was the first to have authorized sets printed in America, which increased sales. The 9th edition, published between 1875 and 1889, was the first to be mass produced and is more easily found today than previous editions. It was often referred to as the “scholar’s edition” due to expanded scientific resources and the number of contributions by prominent scholars of the day. Approximately eleven hundred people provided the 16,000 entries for the encyclopædia. Most contributors were from Western Europe, with fewer than 10% from the United States. Contributors included many notable people such as novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, physicist James Clerk Maxwell, naturalist John Muir, and suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett; this was the first edition to include women contributors.

This 9th edition contained not only intellectual dissertations, but also detailed instructions on how to perform a large variety of activities such as horse shoeing, butterfly collecting and constructing small bridges. This was also the first edition to include birth and death dates in biographical articles.

The editor of the 9th edition was Thomas Spencer Baynes (1823 – 1887), a professor at St. Andrews University who planned and worked on it until his death. William Robertson Smith (1846 – 1894) joined as co-editor in 1881 and completed it. This edition was printed by A. & C. Black in Edinburgh and by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York.

The Encyclopedia Britannica first came to the newly independent United States in 1790 in the form of an appropriated edition published in Philadelphia by Scottish born Thomas Dobson (1751-1823). The first federal copyright act, passed on May 30, 1790, protected only copyrights of U.S. citizens, so it was relatively easy at that time for publishers to claim authorship of works written internationally. Dobson modified the 3rd Edition Encyclopedia Britannica to better suit American readers by adding articles of interest to Americans and by editing entries he thought were written with British bias. This version became known as Dobson’s Encyclopedia and was printed from 1789 to 1798. Several of the Founding Fathers owned this reprint. President George Washington purchased two copies; Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton both owned sets. Even after British copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica reached the United States, Dobson continued to sell his modified encyclopedias at a slightly lower price than the imported ones which were charged higher taxes. The laws concerning copyrighted material remained loose with many publishers continuing to reprint only slightly modified versions of subsequent editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Nearly the same time that the original 9th edition was being issued, another Philadelphian named Joseph M. Stoddart was publishing his own pirated version of the encyclopedia. The nearly simultaneous timing was possible due to a worker at the Neill & Company printing manufactory in Edinburgh which printed the official encyclopedias. As a result of this worker’s job as typesetter, he managed to obtain copies of sheets from the proofreaders, which he speedily shipped to the United States. Stoddart sold his reprints of the encyclopædia for only $5.00, much cheaper than the $9.00 originals from Scotland. Scribner’s and A. & C. Black tried to prevent Stoddart from publishing, but he denied having used stolen materials. In 1879 the courts ruled in his favor. The pirated reprints of the Encyclopædia Britannica distributed in the 1880’s and 1890’s have been estimated to range in the hundred thousands.

The museum’s 9th edition set, however, is an authorized version printed by Scribner’s in New York. On the title page it states, “The Encyclopedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature.” In a time before the vast internet resources utilized by so many today, these books must have been an asset of knowledge to all who could afford them.