Collier's Encyclopedia
Encyclopedia : C : CO : COL : Collier's Encyclopedia
Collier's Encyclopedia (full title Collier's Encyclopedia with Bibliography and Index) was a U.S.-based general encyclopedia. Self-described in its preface as "a scholarly, systematic, continuously revised summary of the knowledge that is most significant to mankind", it was first published in 20 volumes in 1950–51 and in 1962 was expanded to 24 volumes. It was long considered one of the three major contemporary English-language general encyclopedias, together with Encyclopedia Americana and Encyclopædia Britannica: the three were sometimes collectively called "the ABCs".
Editions
The 1997 edition had 23,000 entries. There are not many short entries, as related subjects are usually consolidated in longer articles. A high percentage of the illustrations are in color. Bibliographies are found in the last volume rather than at the end of articles. In recent years, more full-color illustrations were added to the pictorial matter (which accounts for about two-fifths of the pages). The last volume also contains the essential index with 450,000 entries (1997 edition). An annual Collier's Year Book was also published.
Collier's first appeared in 1950–51, relatively late compared to its principal competitors, the New Encyclopædia Britannica and Encyclopedia Americana, which date back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively. In 1962, a major revision expanded Collier's to its ultimate size of 24 volumes. During its more than four decades of existence, the set had achieved a reputation as one of the five or six truly first-rate general multivolume encyclopedias published in North America.
A CD-ROM version of the work was first published in 1996. In 1998, Microsoft bought copyrights to Collier's electronic version and incorporated them into its Encarta electronic encyclopedia. Atlas Editions (formerly Collier Newfield) retained the rights to publish the encyclopedia in book form, though since then, Collier's has ceased to be in print.
For many years Macmillan also published the Merit Students Encyclopedia, a very serviceable 20-volume set that was intended for students in the upper elementary grades on through college. But the encyclopedia was discontinued in 1992, most likely a victim of the sudden collapse of the Maxwell empire.
Publisher and editors
The encyclopedia's publisher, P.F. Collier, was a longtime subsidiary of Macmillan, Inc. until 1993, when the company was acquired by Istituto Geografico de Agostini (an Italian publisher noted for its fine cartographic work) and Planeta Internacional S.A. (a major Spanish reference book publisher) in a 50-50 joint venture. The sale of P.F. Collier became inevitable when Macmillan's parent company, Maxwell Communication Corporation, went bankrupt after the 1991 death of its founder and head, British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell. Maxwell's companies, it developed, were billions of dollars in debt and his unexpected exit forced the dissolution of his worldwide empire, which included newspapers, publishing houses, and Berlitz, the language school.
The creative force behind the early planning of the set was Louis Shores, dean of the library school at Florida State University for many years and a noted authority on reference books. Shores served as the encyclopedia's editorial coordinator from 1946 until its publication in 1950–51. Later, in 1960, he became editor-in-chief, holding that position into the 1970s. In the 1990s, Lauren Bahr was editorial director, the only woman so far to achieve such a high position among the principal U.S. encyclopedia publishers, and Bernard Johnston was editor-in-chief.
These two top editors were supported by a sizable in-house staff, plus approximately 120 advisers who were academic specialists and more than 4,500 contributors, all of whom are listed at the front of Volume 1. The contributors — mostly university professors and writers from the U.S. and United Kingdom — were of a caliber that placed Collier's on a level with Britannica and Americana. Among the more prominent names were Daniel Aaron, Richard Aldington, Paul M. Angle, Isaac Asimov, Carlos Baker, Albert C. Baugh, John Malcolm Brinnin, Henry Steele Commager, Norman Dorsen, Philip S. Foner, Anne Fremantle, John Gassner, Henry F. Graff, Chandler Grannis, Louis J. Halle, Oscar Handlin, Cyril M. Harris, Gerald W. Johnson, Walter Kaufmann, Russell Kirk, David Lodge, Margaret Mead, Roy A. Medvedev, Richard B. Morris, Reinhold Niebuhr, J.H. Plumb, Anthony Powell, Sir Herbert Read, Arnold M. Rose, A.L. Rowse, Gerard Salton, Mark Schorer, B.F. Skinner, Barbara Tuchman, Clement Vose, and Norbert Wiener.
As this sampling shows, by the end of its existence, quite a few of the contributors were retired or deceased, but the editors continued to add new writers to the list each year. In 1993, for example, 87 new contributors were recruited, including Pierre Broué (a French scholar and authority on Leon Trotsky) and Roy A. Medvedev, a prominent Russian historian who furnished the encyclopedia with a fresh biography of Joseph Stalin.
Characteristics
As with any encyclopedia, issues have been raised at times about natural bias on the part of contributors. For example, articles on certain religious groups have been prepared by officers of the Church in question, as in the case where the article on Christian Science is credited to William Duncan Kilpatrick, described in Volume 1 as "Late Manager, Committees on Publication, First Church of Christ Scientist, Boston, Mass." Not surprisingly, the article reads like an official history or press release, with no hint of criticism or debate about the church's teachings on health and medicine or recent internal problems. Collier's ignored Scientology altogether.
Unlike most multi-volume encyclopedias, Collier's was a broad-entry (as opposed to specific-entry) encyclopedia — meaning that small related topics tended to be treated within a long, essay-length omnibus article rather than separately. An example is the Collier's article "Occupational Disease," which includes information on such maladies as carpal tunnel syndrome, leucoderma, and pneumoconiosis (black lung disease). In a specific-entry encyclopedia, these topics (if covered) would most likely have their own entries. Another example is the subject of fluoridation, which is discussed in Collier's in "Water Resources," "Water Treatment," and "Teeth," but has no entry of its own; in a specific-entry encyclopedia (such as rival Encyclopedia Americana) fluoridation would almost certainly be treated separately.
The broad-entry approach has the virtue of placing discrete, or specific, topics within the framework of a larger context thus providing the reader with an expanded view and better overall understanding of the subject. On the other hand, a broad-entry encyclopedia is usually not as effective for quick and easy retrieval of specific topics or facts in the text. Moreover, the broad-entry work forces users to rely heavily on the index to find information — and studies of reference book use indicate many people resist using indexes or simply do not remember to consult them.
The encyclopedia's coverage tends to be well balanced, with prominent people, places, events, and concepts in all major knowledge areas receiving good attention. The editors estimate that about 20 percent of the coverage is devoted to the arts and humanities, 25 percent to science and technology, 35 percent to geography and area studies, and the remaining 20 percent to the social and behavioral sciences — a fair division reflecting contemporary educational interests and trends.
Biographical articles in Collier's ordinarily supplemented the basic facts about the biographee with an attempt to summarize the person's ideas and achievements, placing them in historical or intellectual perspective. Articles on the countries of the world were also thorough: the article on China, for example, comprises more than 60 pages and is admirably current and authoritative. Uzbekistan, one of the smaller former Soviet republics, is accorded more than five pages of coverage and, again, the article is up-to-date and reliable.
Collier's coverage of what is now the former Communist world in Eastern Europe — all of the republics of the old Soviet Union, the Communist political system (before and after the collapse of the U.S.S.R.), and its leaders, such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin — is more extensive than most English language encyclopedias. This presumably stems in part from Macmillan's longtime involvement with the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, an English-language translation of the massive Russian Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia that required more than a decade (1973–83) and much treasure to complete.
Articles on practical subjects often border on "How-tos". The article "Insurance," for instance, discusses various types of insurance (automobile, home, health, etc.) and what to look for when considering their purchase. Similarly, "Child Psychology and Development" includes a section called "Practical Problems of Childhood," which gives information on such matters as day care, divorce, child abuse, sibling rivalry, fears and nightmares, bed-wetting, and the potentially harmful effects of too much television on children. "Drug Abuse" offers realistic counsel on treatment. "Sewing" discusses basic equipment, fabric selection, and the various steps in making a garment.
Some topics receive less coverage than in rival encyclopedias. Carpal tunnel syndrome is mentioned in a brief paragraph on chronic repetitive trauma in "Occupational Disease," but these is no detailed description of the condition or its symptoms or possible treatments. Chelation therapy, a controversial "miracle cure" that has been in the news off and on for a decade or more, receives no coverage. Likewise, Maya Angelou, the writer, and Glenn Gould, the pianist, are missing from the pages of Collier's, as is Scientology and sexual harassmemt. Composer Philip Glass is mentioned only in passing in "Music, History of."
Collier's can be trusted to have its facts right almost all of the time. Editor Johnston and his staff were careful to check and double-check all articles for errors prior to publication. Still, even the most meticulous encyclopedia editors slip up every now and then. For instance, Collier's erroneously reports that the giant panda is a "member of the raccoon family," when in fact genetic tests conducted at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s have clearly established the exotic animal as a member of the bear family. In another instance, the encyclopedia's index gives an incorrect page number under the entry "Fluoridation" (the entry should read 23-352d, not 23-325d).
Information in the encyclopedia is never intentionally biased, and often articles on controversial or sensitive subjects present both the pros and cons of the issue, as in "Abortion" and "Intelligence." The latter, for instance, devotes a lengthy paragraph to the "Intelligence Controversy," which discusses Arthur Jensen's hotly debated findings some years ago concerning race and intelligence based on differences in IQ test scores. Sometimes, however, such subjects are ignored or glossed over, as in "Circumcision," which notes that the procedure is "practiced as a religious rite by Jews, Muslims, and many primitive peoples" and that it is "also extensively practiced in modern medicine as a sanitary measure," but fails to mention any of the contemporary arguments against circumcision or even to acknowledge the controversy. Interestingly, this article was written not by someone with medical training but a rabbi and professor of rabbinical literature.
Collier's had one of the most aggressive and successful revision programs among the major multivolume encyclopedias on the North American market. It consistently outpaced its major competitors, Encyclopedia Americana and the New Encyclopaedia Britannica, in this area. The publisher invested on average more than $2 million each year in maintaining the set. In 1993, the editors added 61 new articles, completely reworked 88, and revised nearly 1,400 others in some manner or other. In addition, almost 800 new illustrations and maps were added, most in color. In all, the 1993 revision entailed resetting 3,638 of the set's nearly 20,000 pages. As a result, the encyclopedia was ordinarily as current as can be expected in a large reference work that is published just once a year.
This does not mean, though, that every article in the encyclopedia was completely up-to-date or that there could be no room for improvement. Some articles — "Adoption," "Christian Science," "Circumcision," "Dead Sea Scrolls," "Galileo," and "Rose" to name a few — failed to include important recent developments. Bill Katz, in a quite positive review of Collier's in his Basic Information Sources (6th ed., McGraw-Hill, 1992, p. 243) finds that, "While most of the material is under continuous revision, and the 'news' items are current, there is evidence that some basic articles are not."
Sales representatives promoted the Collier's Year Book (1960-?) as a convenient way of keeping the encyclopedia up-to-date on an annual basis. The yearbook, which was lavishly and colorfully illustrated, included a detailed review of the previous year's events, plus many articles on people in the news, the countries of the world, the U.S. states, Canadian provinces, and new developments in all areas of knowledge. Unlike most encyclopedia yearbooks, the Collier's Year Book could be a good investment —if it is used. Efforts were made to relate its contents to those of the encyclopedia by means of gummed cross-reference tabs found at the front of the yearbook. The publisher also offered an informative medical yearbook entitled Health and Medical Horizons.
The encyclopedia's writing style was typically clear and to the point. In most instances, the text is comprehensible to adults and college and high school students who possess good-to-average reading skills. Because the editors did not employ a controlled vocabulary or attempt to write to grade level, the set is normally well beyond the reading capabilities of elementary school students as well as most students at the junior high level. To mitigate this, many articles begin simply by defining the topic, but even this device does not automatically ensure easy comprehension. The first sentence of the article "Adoption," for instance, reads "Adoption is the establishment of the relationship of parent and child, in contemplation of law, between persons not so related by nature."
The first two paragraphs of the article 'Heart" offer a more extensive example of the Collier's style:
HEART, a powerful muscular organ, which pumps blood through a system of chambers and valves into a distributing network known as the cardiovascular, or circulatory, system. In man the heart is located near the center of the chest. It is made primarily of a tough resilient tissue, called cardiac muscle, which contracts rhythmically throughout the lifetime of the individual, sending blood pulsing through the arteries and capillaries of the tissues of the body. With each contraction the heart pumps about 2 to 2½ ounces (60-75 milliliters) of blood or, at an average rate of 70 beats per minute, 4 to 5 quarts (4-5 liters) per minute. In 70 years the heart beats more than 2.5 billion times and pumps about 165 million quarts (156 million liters) of blood.As these paragraphs plainly indicate, Collier's did not write down to its readers. It sometimes defined or explained potentially difficult or unfamiliar terms in context, as in the case of cardiovascular system and cardiac muscle in the excerpt above, but this again could not ensure comprehension on the part of young readers. Ultimately, the encyclopedia was written for literate adults and older students — and not for young people, despite what some overzealous publicists and sales representatives might have said.This seemingly tireless pump is about the size of a clenched fist and weighs slightly more than half a pound. Lying nearly on its side beneath the breastbone, it rests upon the dome-shaped diaphragm below, and between the right and left lungs, which fold partially around its front side. It has a truncated conical shape, somewhat bulging at one end like a pear, and its tip lies to the left of the breastbone, directed toward the front of the chest. The large vessels, which carry blood to and from the heart, emerge from the portion away from the tip.
As previously explained, Collier's was a broad-entry encyclopedia, which means that use of the index is often essential for finding specific topics and facts in the set. Fortunately, Colliers possesses an excellent index. The index, which makes up the bulk of Volume 24, contains more than 400,000 entries — or one entry for approximately every 50 words in the 21-million-word encyclopedia This ratio of index entries to text words (1:50) easily beat the competition in the large adult class (both Encyclopedia Americana and the New Encyclopaedia Britannica have approximate ratios of 1:90) and is second only to the Academic American Encyclopedia (1:45) among all general encyclopedias. The set also included some 13,000 cross-references in the text, which helped steer the reader to related articles.
Unlike most encyclopedias, Collier's published a separate bibliography rather than appending bibliographies — lists of recommended sources for additional information — to articles throughout the set. The bibliography section, found at the beginning of Volume 24 preceding the index, contains roughly 11,500 titles grouped by broad subjects and then subdivided into more specific topics. For example, a book on Galileo is found under "General Science — History of Science and Biographies of Scientists." The titles listed usually represent good selections for students and are briefly annotated. The Galileo entry, for instance, is for Stillman Drake's Galileo (Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), described as a "Short biography of the founder of modern physics." Also, the bibliographies can be located via the index, designated by the subentry "—Bib."
Unfortunately, the bibliographies in Volume 24 were not always as up-to-date as they could or should be. Of the 16 titles listed under "Economics and Business — History of Economic Thought — General Studies," the most recent was published in 1983 and half were published in the 1960s, or 30 years earlier. Of the 15 titles under "Economics and Business — Circulation of Wealth — Investments," none is more recent than 1984; two were published in the 1960s. Apparently in order to help rectify this problem, the editors began to include selected bibliographies with the articles themselves; "Abortion" and "Black Americans" were examples of this new policy.
Illustrations in Collier's improved dramatically over the years. Many black-and-white photographs were replaced by four-color illustrations. For example, well over 2,000 color photos alone were added to the set in the early 1990s. A new type of paper was introduced, especially designed to enhance color quality. A representative example of the encyclopedia's enhanced visual appeal in this period was the article "Painting". The set's major maps were by Rand McNally.
In 1980, the encyclopedia critic Harvey Einbinder wrote (Wilson Library Bulletin, December 1980, p. 261) that "readers who peruse the pages of Collier's today are carried back three decades in a time machine — viewing a 1950 black-and-white kinescope instead of a bright, multi-colored video image." This was true in 1980, but not in the 1990s. The editors of Collier's succeeded in their sustained effort to bring the encyclopedia up to speed visually. More work remained — to the end, the articles "Motion Pictures" and "Circus," for instance, still included the type of graphics Einbinder was complaining about — but great strides had been made and Collier's held promise to soon be among the best illustrated encyclopedias on the market.
The set's physical format was well constructed and aesthetically appealing. The binding — black Fabrikoid with red panels and gold lettering — is both sturdy and attractive. The paper is of very good quality and particularly suitable for color reproduction. The two-column page layout lacks flair but is clean and functional. The many new color illustrations add much to improve the set's overall appearance. In sum, Collier's is not a flashy encyclopedia, but it is a well-built, smartly put together set of reference books.
Bibliography
American Reference Books Annual, 1992, pp. 16-17
Reference Books Bulletin, September 15, 1993, pp. 174-76
Reference Sources for Small and Medium-Sized Libraries, 5th ed. (Chicago: American Library Assn., 1992), pp. 30-31.
William A. Katz, Introduction to Reference Work, vol. 1, pp. 242-43
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