Encyclopedia Americana - Early History

Early History

The Encyclopædia Americana. A popular dictionary of arts, sciences, literature, history, politics and biography, brought down to the present time; including a copious collection of original articles in American biography; on the basis of the 7th ed. of the German Conversations-Lexicon was founded by German-born Francis Lieber. After Dobson's Encyclopædia (1789–1798), it was the first significant American encyclopedia.

Lieber presented the idea of an American encyclopedia, based on Brockhaus' Conversations-Lexikon, to Carey, Lea & Carey of Philadelphia in January 1828, then the largest publishing house in the United States. Although he invoked the name of the German encyclopedia, he explained that this work would not be simply a translation but be a distinctively American reference work, omitting much of the European matter. The publishers were not at first receptive to the idea, but Lieber had made numerous contacts with American intellectuals who convinced the publishers to commit to the project. Several weeks later they replied with their agreement to the project. "However," notes, "instead of being granted a royalty on sets sold, he would be compensated by payments totaling $20,000, and from this sum he must defray editorial costs, such as fees for translators and contributors and salaries of editorial assistants. This may have been a fair enough proposition for the period, but it would leave Lieber in straitened circumstances when the work was done."

Assisted by Edward Wigglesworth, a recent graduate of Harvard University, Lieber set to work. When its was clear they could not keep to their scheduled output of a volume every three months, Thomas Gamaliel Bradford joined the editorial team. The editors offered fifty cents per German page to translators of the Conversations-Lexicon, while contributors of new articles would receive one dollar per page. The later was the rate set by the North American Review. Notable contributors to this edition include: Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who provided some twenty articles on legal topics including "Common Law", "Contract", "Corpus Delicti", "Courts of England and the United States", "Criminal Law", "Equity", "Evidence", "Jury", "Law", "Natural Law", and "Usury"; John Pickering, who wrote "Agrarian Law", "Americanism", "Indian Languages", and part of "Accents"; and John Davidson Godman, who agreed to contribute articles on natural history, but his work was prematurely ended when he died of tuberculosis in 1830. Also worthy of note was Joseph Bonaparte, the older brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose contributions on French topics include a 25,000 word biography on the former emperor of France, which according to De Kay was the longest biographical article in the Encyclopedia Americana.

The first volume was released September 1829, at the price of $2.50, and quickly sold out. When completed in 1833, the first edition comprised 13 volumes. Despite the success of the Encyclopedia, the Panic of 1837 led the Careys to scale back their catalog and concentrate on medical works. Nevertheless, this work continued to return profits to its owners on a regular basis. Publishing houses across the United States, and even in Canada, would rent or purchase Carey stereotype plates and publish Encyclopedia editions with their own imprints at the foot of the title pages, while retaining the Carey copyright notes on the overleaf, through 1858. In 1846, a supplementary fourteenth volume was issued.

In 1848, John Sutter used the set to verify the authenticity of the gold found in his mill, a discovery that would start the California Gold Rush.

A separate "Encyclopedia Americana," published by J.M. Stoddart, was printed between 1883 and 1889, as a supplement to American reprintings of the 9th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Stoddart's work, however, is not connected to the earlier work by Lieber.

In 1902 a new version in 16 volumes that carried over some of the old material was published under the title Encyclopedia Americana, under the editorial supervision of Scientific American magazine. The magazine's editor, Frederick Converse Beach, was editor-in-chief, and was said to be assisted by hundreds of eminent scholars and authorities who served as consulting editors or authors. The first publisher was R.S. Peale & Co; between 1903 and 1906 further editions were issued by the Americana Corp. and the Scientific American Compiling Department, with George Edwin Rines appointed managing editor in 1903. The relationship with Scientific American was terminated in 1911. From 1907 to 1912, the work was published as The Americana.

A major new edition appeared in 1918-20 in 30 volumes, with George Edwin Rines as editor-in-chief. An Annual or Yearbook was also published each year beginning in 1923 and continuing until 2000.

The encyclopedia was purchased by Grolier in 1945. By the 1960s sales of the Americana and its sister publications under Grolier — The Book of Knowledge, the Book of Popular Science, and Lands and Peoples — were strong enough to support the company's occupancy of a large building (variously named the Americana Building and the Grolier Building) in Midtown Manhattan, at 575 Lexington Avenue. Sales during this period were accomplished primarily through mail-order and door-to-door operations. Telemarketing and third-party distribution through their Lexicon division added to sales volumes in the 1970s. By the late 1970s, Grolier had moved its operations to Danbury, Connecticut.