encyclopedia

As you may have heard, the Wifey and I bought a vanload of old books at a rural auction.  We have touched pretty much everything we got at the auction, but we’re just getting to looking deeply at our new acquisions.  We’ve set aside boxes of ‘cutters’ (damaged or otherwise worthless picture books, for altered art), books for resale, and books to keep.    In the end, we found that most of what we got were boxes of encyclopedias — partial encyclopedia sets.  Oh, there were a few complete sets.  Spread out amongst 3 or 4 boxes we assembled two complete sets of the Teacher’s and Pupil’s Cyclopedia…which I already owned a set of.   You know you’ve got a book-collecting problem when you own three copies of the same encyclopedia.  I may write more about those in the future.    The most disappointing partial set we acquired is The Book of Knowledge.

The Book of Knowledge traces its origin back to 1880s England, when writer Arthur Mee was enlisted to write for Sir Alfred Harmsworth’s “Harmsworth Self-Educator“, a magazine of facts and instruction on improving one’s life and knowledge.  In editing and compiling the varied and flowering knowledge that filled the pages of the Self-Educator, Mee saw value to compiling an educational library for children.   In 1908, Mee released The Children’s Encyclopedia.   Today, we visualize an encyclopedia as a alphabetized collection of dry, informational articles that you used to jump-start a gradeschool research paper.   Mee’s Encyclopedia was nothing of the sort.   The Children’s Encyclopedia was far more magazine-like in structure, having no categorical or alphabetical organization.  Categories could be seen, but no individual volume had more or less of any particular type of information than any other.  Grab any single volume, and it contains short stories, how-to articles, poetry, scientific explanations, moral instruction, and historical narratives.  Mee’s intent was to include the basis for an entire education in a few dozen books.

In 1912, Mees’ Children’s Encyclopedia was embraced by the 20-year-old Grolier Society, Inc.   Grolier was a subscription-based publisher at that time, selling book series door-to-door and selling editions on a monthly basis.   The first major change to the Children’s Encyclopedia was a change of name:  Grolier released the American edition as The Book of Knowledge.

The Book of Knowledge lent itself well to being purchased in installments:  each the unstructured volume stands well on its own, broken up into chapters (called ‘books’) such as “The Book of the Earth”, “The Book of Golden Deeds” , “The Book Of Our Own Life”.   Each ‘book’ has several chapters, each a separate, stand-alone article.  While the books are intended for children, the basic knowledge isn’t dumbed-down to an insulting level.  The books are well-written, readable by children and adults alike, and many articles appear written for children and adults to read together.   Mee continued his writing, when not revising his Encyclopedia, by publishing The Children’s Newspaper, a periodical extension of the Encyclopedia that is still available online.

It appears that we own the 1912 first US edition, because there is no date later than 1911 on the copyright page.   Editions were put out well into the 1960s, after which time Grolier had acquired the Encyclopedia Americana, and revised the Book of Knowledge as the New Book of Knowledge with a more encyclopedic format.  In terms of value, there’s a dual market for these books.   Collectors, like myself, love the older editions with their classic literature and Edwardian progressive sensibilities, but the other market is a bit more unusual.  I was quite surprised to find out that Home-Schooling organizations recommend using the Book of Knowledge in curriculum due to its relevance and ease in education.  As I mentioned above, our set of The Book of Knowledge is one of the encyclopedia sets that is, sadly, incomplete.   The original set was 20 volumes, and we’ve got about 3/4.   It may take some shoppping to get a complete set, but I have every intention of completing this womderful series.

Flowing on the same wave as the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, education for women was a prominent ideal and goal for a modern U.S.A. among progressives. The Delphian Society was formed in Chicago around 1910 to promote education in the arts, literature, and history in a specially-designed format directed at women specifically. Chapters of the Delphian Society opened across the country. This ‘Delphian Course’ was a combination of book club and correspondence course, involving a condensed library/encyclopedia, and course guides for running a meeting and how to discuss their scheduled readings. The meetings were deliberately non-scholarly; while the members were required to present what they’d learned during their assigned readings, prepared notes and outlines were discouraged and members were encouraged to speak briefly from direct knowledge and understanding rather than reciting a prepared speech.

I first encountered the Delphian Society at an antique shop in Columbia, Missouri. I was always a sucker for the antiquarian booksellers, despite my destitute college student status, so I stretched my dollar as best I could. Because there were only volumes 1 and 5 present, the books were relatively cheap. I was intrigued by the fraternalistic style of the books, thinking the Delphian Society something like the Order of the Eastern Star or Degree of Honor, a women’s auxillary of some beneficial association. Over the years, I’ve acquired most of the series.

As textbooks go, the Delphian Course textbooks are very finely done. I am unsure exactly how much the Course cost, but it couldn’t have been cheap. Each edition is hardbound in green cloth, embossed and gold-leafed, which rides the line between cheap textbook and fine edition. The pages are uncut in two sides, with an (in my opinion) overly rough deckle edge, although the top edge is uniformly clean-cut and gilded on all the editions I have. There is a full-color frontispiece, complete with vellum, and the description of the frontispiece printed directly on the vellum separator. Plates are also scattered throughout the volumes, sometimes with vellum in the same format as the frontispiece, and the plates could either be in color (primarily maps) or just black-and-white. Black-and-white illustrations are also included throughout the text as well. Overall, I’d rank the craftsmanship a few steps higher than encyclopedia sets of the time, but below finely bound ‘limited edition’ books from the same period. From the condition of the books I own, I would say that it is likely one set was shared between several members of the Delphian Society, rather than each member purchasing their own set.

The content of the Delphian Course is surprisingly thorough, and not insulting to the intelligence of their intended students. The books do lean heavily on quotes and sections taken from other books (particularly the literature volumes), but they are not useless padding, and their inclusion is explained in the course for their relevance. In my jaded eye, I’d say the books do dwell a bit too long on the mysticism and mythology of ancient societies, but such topics were a popular subject at the time and may have been included with historical context to help keep the interest of the students of the Course. Me, I prefer a detailed, dry history book over a fluff quasi-prose history book, so the volumes I’ve read sections from have been quite good.

The books themselves were organized in a relatively chronological order, but the intention was not to read each volume from cover to cover. The entire Course encompassed six years — a lofty goal, seeing most women at the time rarely spent that long in grammar school, let alone while keeping a home or helping in the fields. I only have the instructional booklet for Year One, which I suspect is the most common one to find, as the numbers of guidebooks sent out probably dwindled as years progressed. Year One covered the first three volumes, primarily ancient history. The Course guide ties together several chapters, not necessarily consecutively, into once-a-month discussion points, so it appears that the volumes were a reference, rather than linear reading material. The appeal, to me, for these books is in the tying together of the historical threads that produced the Delphian Society: progressivism in education and equality, growing public interest in the arts and humanities, the suffrage movement, and the beneficial society movement of the early 20th century.