You Could Look It Up (61 page)

The pattern has been much followed over the centuries. The big unabridged dictionaries take years of work and almost never earn back their expenses. This is true even of monuments like the
Oxford English Dictionary
—its editor's biographer wrote, “Looked at from a business angle the Dictionary was clearly a failure.”
2
Publishers would go broke if they had to depend on sales of flagship products. Oxford University Press and Merriam-Webster make their money where Johnson's publishers did: selling abridged versions of their flagship dictionaries to a large audience.
3

Encyclopedias are, if anything, an even harder sell. In the 1770s Charles-Joseph Panckoucke confidently began compiling his own
Encyclopédie méthodique
as an answer to the
Encyclopédie
, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested he would break even with between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand advance subscriptions. When he was ready to start writing, he tallied up his subscribers and found a grand total of just one hundred sixty-two.
4
Clearly, more aggressive salesmanship was required. “The industry believes encyclopedias are sold and not bought,” said the editor of the American Library Association's
Reference Books Bulletin
. “You must have representation from a salesman.”
5

And so salesmen were called in. Through most of the twentieth century, as many as 90 percent of American encyclopedias were sold door to door.
6
Salesmen (and, on occasion, saleswomen) knocked on the doors in suburban neighborhoods and extolled the virtues of their wares—a compendium of knowledge that would enlighten, entertain, and even impress the neighbors by making the room look classy. The ritual was scripted, starting with the “opener,” or initial sales pitch, with reference to local satisfied customers; moving to the “spread,” which involved opening sample volumes and pamphlets around the room; and ending with the “close,” which was supposed to end with a check in the salesman's pocket.
7
Children were the real target. What about Tommy's book report in Mrs. Davis's class? Where else will he be able to find the population of Guatemala or the chemical formula of formaldehyde? The pitch might continue that the fifteen-volume
Britannica Junior
might be sufficient, but to excel in school, the deluxe reference package was better choice: the twenty-four-volume encyclopedia, the
Britannica World Atlas
, the
World Language Dictionary
, and the
Book of the Year
, updated—at no extra cost!—every year for a decade!
8

The best salesmen got very good at it. They were selling not books but a lifestyle, a future, a promise of social mobility. Having
Britannica
on the shelves proved the family was cultivated, literate, and curious, even if, a month or two after the set was delivered, odd volumes were serving as a baby's booster seat or propping up uneven table legs. One
Britannica
salesman, J. S. Dalton, became legendary in company lore. He once ran his car off the road and barely escaped while it was hanging over a cliff. Two other motorists stopped, pulled him to safety, and saved his life. In the time it took for help to arrive, Dalton managed to sell one of them a complete set of encyclopedias.
9

The sales pitch could be assertive—encyclopedias were sold by high-pressure hucksters, not always remarkable for their honesty and integrity.
Britannica
paid no salaries, leaving the sales force to live entirely on commissions.
10
All sorts of improper means were used to get the foot in the door, and all sorts of promises made that the salesman had no expectation of keeping. The best—or worst?—of the sales force could teach a thing or two to
The Music Man
's Harold Hill: Yessir, order now and get the dee-luxe one-hundred-percent gen-yoo-wine faux leatherette binding.

Sellers found all sorts of ways to mislead potential buyers, like pretending to be taking surveys or distributing raffle tickets.
11
Even when the pitches weren't outright lies, the pressure could be unseemly. Not buying an encyclopedia? Well, ma'am, if you're the type of mother who isn't concerned for her child's future, I suppose there's nothing I can do to change that … The spirit of the era is caught in an all-too-accurate Monty Python sketch, in which a man seeks to enter a woman's apartment by pretending to be a thief:

The moment she opens the door, he begins: “Mind you, I don't know whether you've really considered the advantages of owning a really fine set of modern encyclopaedias …” In the United States it got bad enough that in 1972, the Federal Trade Commission lodged a complaint against several encyclopedia publishers for deceptive practices. A 1978 ruling determined that they were indeed breaking the law. A series of rulings led to a new regime: sales representatives had to declare immediately that they were selling encyclopedias.
12
But the age of door-to-door sales was nearly at an end.
Britannica
watched its market fall apart with the arrival of online resources. In the 1970s they had more than two thousand door-to-door sales people selling $2,000 sets of encyclopedias across the country.
World Book
, even more assertive, had forty-five thousand door-to-door representatives by the late 1980s.
13
But by 1996—the year when the last one thousand door-to-door salespeople were laid off—
Britannica
's sales had fallen by 60 percent.
14

Britannica
was not ready for the electronic age, and they stumbled badly—but then so have many publishers. Print sales of multivolume reference books are all but dead, and the industry is still struggling to figure out how to make money online. Some dictionaries and encyclopedias are prepared by national academies or other organizations that can write off the loss as a public service. Many reference publishers have given up on marketing to individuals and count on university libraries for all their sales. Others charge monthly or annual fees, though competing with free services like Wikipedia and Dictionary.com is not easy. Others still provide free access and depend on advertising revenue. Even the free services sometimes have to beg for spare change, as when Wikipedia goes on public-television-inspired fundraising drives. Which plan will win? It is the biggest unanswered question in the reference world today.

CHAPTER
24

FULL AND AUTHORITATIVE INFORMATION

Doctrine for the Modern World

Many reference books end up with an authority they never sought for themselves. We consider “the dictionary” the authoritative word on language, and we feel something must be true if it’s in an encyclopedia. Few lexicographers or encyclopedists want that authority, but it is often thrust on them nonetheless. A few reference books, though, demand to be treated with deference and claim to lay down the law.

The early twentieth century was a rough time for doctrine, and traditional belief systems were increasingly challenged. The process began in the European Enlightenment and picked up steam over the revolutionary era of the early nineteenth century. Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, and Freud demolished old certainties. By the end of the nineteenth century, one conventional piety after another had been challenged, discredited, or simply ignored.

The Catholic Encyclopedia
was compiled to meet a need: orthodoxy was under attack. At the beginning of the twentieth century, prominent Roman Catholics were concerned that other encyclopedias were not merely indifferent to this attack, but actually aiding the forces of evil with their own anti-Catholic bias. Diderot and d’Alembert’s
Encyclopédie
had enraged many, and the Catholic Church was high on the list of aggrieved parties. It responded by putting the
Encyclopédie
on the
Index
expurgatorius
in 1759 and nearly excommunicating Diderot. And while the great encyclopedia from the other side of the Channel was less radical in its freethinking tendencies, Catholics pointed out that the
Encyclopædia Britannica
treated only Protestantism with respect, while “Roman Catholicism receives more censure than Judaism.”
1

“The need of a Catholic Encyclopedia in English,” the editors of
The Catholic Encyclopedia
wrote, “was manifest for many years before it was decided to publish one. Editors of various general Encyclopedias had attempted to make them satisfactory from a Catholic point of view, but without success.”
2
A London-based Catholic magazine,
The Month
,
published a brutal review of the new
Britannica
in 1911, lashing out at its “anti-Catholic animus.” The reviewer worried that articles “on purely Catholic topics” were too often assigned to writers who were not Catholic; as a result, the entries on “Church History” were nothing but “a series of articles thoroughly Protestant and necessarily incorrect.”
The Catholic Encyclopedia
was conceived, written, and marketed as a response to this sort of “unscholarly bigotry.”
3
The introduction promised “full and authoritative information on the entire cycle of Catholic interests, action and doctrine,”
4
and that is what the team of editors and contributors delivered.

For the encyclopedia to be Catholic meant that it must exclude “facts and information which have no relation to the Church.” Catholics may need to know the length of the Nile and the atomic weight of sodium as much as anyone else, but these subjects did not make the cut because “there is no specifically Catholic science,” and “mathematics, physiology and other branches of human knowledge are neither Catholic, Jewish, nor Protestant.” Nor does the
Encyclopedia
include entries on prominent people who happen to be Catholic. Instead it is about Catholic saints, martyrs, doctrine, and liturgy. There is another respect, though, in which
The Catholic Encyclopedia
lived up to its name: it presumed to give authoritative answers to questions of faith. As the preface explained, “Designed to present its readers with the full body of Catholic teaching, the E
NCYCLOPEDIA
contains … precise statements of what the Church has defined.”
5
Coverage of questions on which the Church itself had no definitive answers was balanced, but once a verdict was handed down from the Vatican, the matter was considered settled.