Not thirteen encyclopedias side by side on a shelf — thirteen encyclopedias side by side on the page.
We hold thirteen general A–Z encyclopedias printed between 1829 and 1924. Published separately they would be thirteen websites competing for the same words: thirteen entries for Onyx, thirteen for Austria, each a few hundred words long, each burying the other.
Published together, one page per subject, they become something none of them is alone — a record of how an idea was explained and re-explained across a century. The overlap stops being waste and starts being the point.
Every set is indexed to a single subject key, so Agriculture in the 1829 Americana and Agriculture in Collier’s 1921 land on the same page instead of on thirteen competing ones.
Accounts run oldest to newest. Reading down the page is reading forward through a century of opinion — which is the one thing a single encyclopedia can never give you.
Each account shows its opening and folds the rest away with its length on the label. A short definition stays short; the 1911 Britannica’s 29,000 words stay out of your way until you ask.
The hardest case we could pick: a subject every encyclopedia treats at length, where the 1911 Britannica alone runs 29,441 words. If the design survives Agriculture it survives anything.
Counts for the three digitized sets are measured; the rest are projected from the volumes on disk and shown here only to illustrate the shape of the finished index.
| Published | Encyclopedia | Vols | Scan pages | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| c. 1829 | Encyclopaedia Americana (Carey & Lea edition) | 8 | 4,915 | awaiting OCR |
| c. 1881 | Hill's Practical Encyclopedia | 4 | 2,700 | awaiting OCR |
| c. 1889 | The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia | 10 | 8,890 | awaiting OCR |
| c. 1898 | Chandler's Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge | 3 | 1,732 | awaiting OCR |
| c. 1903 | The Americana | 23 | 18,076 | awaiting OCR |
| c. 1905 | Nelson's Encyclopaedia | 12 | 8,924 | awaiting OCR |
| 1910 | Aiton's Encyclopedia | 5 | 3,496 | digitized |
| 1911 | Encyclopaedia Britannica (eleventh edition) | 29 | — | digitized |
| c. 1911 | The New Practical Reference Library | 6 | 1,270 | awaiting OCR |
| c. 1912 | The University Encyclopedia of 20th Century Knowledge | 10 | 7,602 | awaiting OCR |
| c. 1919 | Winston's Cumulative Encyclopedia | 10 | 5,097 | awaiting OCR |
| c. 1920 | Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopedia | 12 | 8,327 | awaiting OCR |
| 1921 | Collier's New Encyclopedia | 12 | 6,106 | digitized |
Dates marked “c.” are approximate and still to be confirmed against the title pages — the sets they belong to have not been through OCR yet.