All There is to Know: Readings from the Illustrious Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica

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In the world of encyclopedias, only the Britannica has attained the status of literature. From the century and a half of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's existence, it was the eleventh edition - published in 1910 - that is universally regarded as an exemplar of encyclopedias and the supreme reference tool of the cultivated English-speaking reader. This unique book, All There Is to Know, is a celebration of and an homage to the great eleventh edition. Gathered here in a single volume are the most fascinating and essential, the most idiosyncratic and gloriously thoughtful entries from the eleventh - an eclectic selection of readings for the robustly curious person. Unlike the alphabetically arranged encyclopedia itself, All There Is to Know takes the Britannica's finest pieces and organizes them under the categorical rubrics of "Brief Lives," "Crimes and Punishments," "Fun and Games," "The Invisible World," "Natural Selections," "The Literary Life," "Peoples," "O Tempora, O Mores!," and "Things of This World." Readers will find essays of rare brilliance, ebullience, and authority about subjects as varied as Base-Ball; Pugilism; the Cockroach; the Evil Eye; Fire-Walking; Boiling to Death; and the lives of Jane Austen, P. T. Barnum, Cinderella, and Henry James. Also included are the celebrated essays by Lucien Wolf on Anti-Semitism and by Lord Macaulay on Samuel Johnson; a sociologically backward essay on the Negro; and explanations of such phenomena as Running Amuck, Tarring and Feathering, and Toast. The eleventh edition of the Britannica is uniquely representative of that era before the Great War and several proletarian revolutions, before the Theory of Relativity and the messy intrusions of the modern age. With its distinct "Oxbridge" point of view, the eleventh sought to catalog all available knowledge of flora and fauna, significant people, historical events, "foreign" cultures, and ideas of import. But the Britannica also revealed its quirkiness by meticulousl