The Encyclopedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information (32 volumes in 16 books)

New York: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc, 1922. Eleventh Edition; Twelfth Edition (New Volumes, Volumes 30-32). Hardcover. Good. Quarto [22 cm] Green cloth over boards. Gilt stamped title on the spine. Title and ornamental borders in pale green ink on the front board. Bindings rubbed. First 4 books with dampstaining to the lower extremities of the boards and light dampstaining to the fore-edge corners of the pages. Rear board of volume 6 with dampstaining. Occasional tears to cloth of the spine, primarily at the ends. A handful of weak hinges. ***Will require extra postage due to the number of volumes and weight. Shipping outside of the United States is strongly discouraged. The 11th edition brought a change in both plan and method of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Previous editions had consistently planned to provide comprehensive treatises on major subjects as well as detailed information on particulars and had inevitably lacked coherence because of the method of printing, whereby they appeared in parts over a considerable period of time. The 11th edition, while not seeking to treat major subjects superficially, abandoned the single-treatise plan not only as "cumbrous in a work of reference" but also as liable to omit "specific issues which consequently received no proper treatment." Instead, "the dictionary plan, by automatically providing headings throughout the work, under which, where appropriate, articles of more or less length may be put, enables every subject to be treated, comprehensively or in detail, yet as part of an organic whole, by means of careful articulation adapted to the requirements of an intelligent reader." The splitting up of what would have been treatises in former editions meant that the 11th edition had more than double the number of articles in the ninth-40,000 instead of 17,000-although the text was not much longer.