Review of ‘All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia’ by Simon Garfield

When was the last time you consulted an encyclopaedia? (not including anything with ‘wiki’ in the title!) Simon Garfield explores the rise and fall of printed encyclopaedias (particularly Britannica), their replacement with CD-ROMs (remember Encarta?) and the domination of online information sources. The question of what encyclopaedias should be, how the knowledge ought to be organised, bias / censorship and how the products were marketed – including the dreaded encyclopaedia salesmen! – are in focus. Encyclopaedias, he argues, are valuable as snapshots of their time, capturing what experts believed and what they thought ordinary people should know. They are certainly not useful as current authorities, because all reference books, by their very natures, are obsolete as soon as they are printed.

Book cover of a row of encyclopaedia spines.

Some parts of this book were interesting, while others were as dull as leafing through, well, an encyclopaedia entry on something very dull. I learned a lot from it, but the writing style was not as engaging as some of the author’s other books. Tedious descriptions of various Wikipedia editors’ usernames, which entries they edited, what time they edited them, etc, were unnecessary. Numbers are everywhere in this book, such as how many pages, words and articles assorted encyclopaedias had for different editions. Unless you’re studying this topic, it doesn’t add anything interesting to the reading experience. I would have preferred more of a narrative journey, such as we had in the excellent In Miniature.

First published in 2022 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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