Britannica or Americana?

Abstract

With a flourish of trumpets and an American-style promotion-campaign, years of advance publicity — with the adventitious feature of a breach with Sir William Haley who went to Chicago to help to direct the venture, but eventually left it and whose name does not appear — the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica has at last made its appearance in thirty volumes.¹ Unlike Aldous Huxley, who usually travelled with a volume of an encyclopaedia for company, I am not encyclopaedia-minded. My attitude is strictly utilitarian; I keep an encyclopaedia just to look things up in — I do not require it for my spiritual or moral, or even intellectual, welfare. I do not need to be told what I am to think about this or that; no doubt some people do, and here they will find it.