Print encyclopedias had grand ambitions–collecting and standardizing all human knowledge, encouraging rationalism, etc.–but there was a huge downside. As good as their intentions may have been, those editing the volumes were guided by their own prejudices and that narrowness was reflected in the books. Our current free-for-all of information assemblage is an improvement. It was a lie to begin with to believe that we could somehow neatly place all knowledge in a few orderly volumes. Instead this delusion has passed away and been replaced by far greater depth and navigability, thanks to our online culture. But in “What We’ve Lost With The Demise Of Print Encyclopedias” in the New Republic, David A. Bell sees a dark cloud: the expungment of a coherent throughline of knowledge. An excerpt:

“Yet with the disappearance of paper encyclopedias, a part of the Western intellectual tradition is disappearing as well. I am not speaking of the idea of impartial, objective, and meticulously accurate reference. There is no reason this cannot be duplicated in digital media. Even Wikipedia, despite its amateur, volunteer authors, has emerged as an increasingly important and accurate reference tool, reaping respectful commentary last month from no less an authority than William Cronon, president of the American Historical Association. And I am not speaking of the pleasures that come from the serendipitous browsing of handsome encyclopedia volumes, in which the idle flip of a finger takes one from Macaroni to Douglas MacArthur, and thence to Macao, Macbeth, and the Maccabees. The internet provides its own opportunities for serendipitous discovery.

But the great paper encyclopedias of the past had other, grander ambitions: They aspired to provide an overview of all human knowledge, and, still more boldly, to put that knowledge into a coherent, logical order. Even if they mostly organized their articles alphabetically, they also sought ways to link the material together thematically—all of it. In 1974, for instance, the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica added to the work a one-volume ‘Propaedia,’ which sought to provide a detailed outline of human knowledge, while referencing the appropriate articles of the encyclopedia itself. Large headings such as ‘Life,’ ‘Society,’ and ‘Religion’ were subdivided into forty-odd ‘divisions’ and then further into hundreds of individual ‘sections.'” (Thanks Browser.)

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Jiminy Cricket, who caused considerable damage to the crops due to his herbivorous feeding habits, encourages your children to be less gormless: