The idea of a world encyclopaedia. 3 items

Forerunner of Wikipedia

(1) The idea of a world encyclopaedia. 32pp. London: Hogarth Press, 1936. 184 x 125 mm. Original printed wrappers, a bit soiled, spine faded. With:

(2) The idea of a world encyclopedia. In Harper's Magazine, no. 1043 (April 1937): 472-482. Whole number.260 x 183 mm. Original printed wrappers, extremities a bit chipped, one or two tiny edge tears. With:

(3) World brain. xx, 194pp. New York: Doubleday,m Doran & Co., 1938. 191 x 132 mm. Original cloth, dust-jacket (a bit spotted). Presentation card laid in. First Amerian edition.

Together 3 items.

In 1936 H. G. Wells issued a small pamphlet of 32 pages entitled "The Idea of a World Encyclopaedia," publishing a lecture he had delivered at The Royal Institution on November 20, 1936. The lecture was republished in the United States in the April 1937 issue of Harpers Magazine, and again in a volume of essays published by Methuen in London and Doubleday in New York. Wells had a vision for

". . .a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared," and believed that technological advances such as microfilm could be utilized towards this end so that

"any student, in any part of the world, would be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."

Aspects of Wells's vision were eventually realized on the Internet through the Wikipedia in ways that Wells could not have imagined. W. Boyd Raward, "H.G. Wells's Idea of a World Brain: A Critical Reassment," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50 (1999) 557-573.