An old Encyclopaedia Britannica is a work to cherish

Two thousand years ago, a young Cilician named Oppian, wanting to rehabilitate his disgraced father, decided to write Halieutica, an account of the world of fishes, as a gift for Marcus Aurelius. It was a mixture of possible fact and definite fiction – if only there were octopuses that climb trees and fishes that fancy goats – and it was a success. His father was forgiven, and the son’s written work accepted as authoritative knowledge. In short, although Wikipedia, ‘the free encyclopaedia’, calls Halieutica ‘a didactic epic,’ it was an early encyclopaedia – a word taken from the Greek enkyklios paideia, meaning ‘knowledge in the round’, and which has come to denote a set of books that contains articles that can be cross-referenced, is in alphabetical order and is the authors’ view of what knowledge needs to be known and what unknowns need to remain unknown.

Simon Garfield does not write about Oppian (I mention him not for one-upmanship but because more people should know about a man who wrote that deer sailed the sea using their horns as sails). But this history of the encyclopaedia (and its future) does not lack for learned gentlemen and their learned books. This is definitely a man’s world: in the first Encyclopaedia Britannica the definition of ‘woman’ was ‘the female of man. See Homo’, and things did not much improve until the 20th century.

And so many men: British, German, French, Chinese. Britannica was by no means the first. Garfield makes a convincing case for the encyclopaedic status of works by Pliny (who believed menstruating women can expel insects from the trees), Gervase of Tilbury, Isidore of Seville and (delightfully) a Herr Franckenstein, whose detailed medical entries instructed any prospective amputators of arms that the time needed for sawing through forearm bones was about the same needed to say the Lord’s Prayer.