Encyclopedia

"was the leading provider of encyclopedias in the , but after sales declined rapidly in the early 1990s the company was forced to file for bankruptcy. Many different organizational and market factors contributed to this crisis, such as the diffusion of the , the invention of , the technical challenges of moving text to electronic formats, and the difficulties of inventing a new format while also operating the leading seller of books."

"... I plowed through relentlessly, beginning with the shortest articles and gradually working my way into the longer ones. The of irrelevant and incredible information that still burdens me had its origins in those pages, and I almost wore them out acquiring it."

"Works of reference are extremely useful; but they resemble Virgil's in that they are easy things to get into and very difficult to escape. Take the Encyclopædia. I imagine that my experience with it is universal. I have only to dip my toe into this tempting morass and down I am sucked, limbs, trunk and all, to remain until sleep or a visitor comes to haul me out. A man will read things in the Encyclopædia that he would never dream of looking at elsewhere—things in which normally he does not take the faintest interest. One may take up a volume after lunch in order to discover the parentage of Thomas Nashe; but one does not put it down when one has satisfied one's curiosity. One turns over a few pages and becomes absorbed in the career of Napoleon. Thence one drifts to the article on , which sends one to that on s in another volume ...."

"A midway solution between the tree and the rhizome was the one proposed by the Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment. Trying to transform the tree into a map, the eighteenth-century encyclopedia, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and of d'Alembert, made in fact the rhizome thinkable. In respect to its hierarchical structure, the eighteenth-century encyclopedia was not necessarily different from a tree. What does make it distinct is, in the first place, the hypothetical nature of the tree: it does not reproduce a presumed structure of the world, but presents itself as the most economic solution with which to confront and resolve a particular problem of the reunification of knowledge. In the second place, the encyclopedist knows that the tree organizes, yet impoverishes, its content, and he hopes to determine as precisely as he can the intermediary paths between the various nodes of the tree so that little by little it is transformed into a geographical chart or a map."