Otto's Encyclopedia - The First Edition

The First Edition

At the beginning of 1880s, Jan Otto, a Czech book-seller and publisher, began planning a new general Czech encyclopedia. He was inspired by the first Czech encyclopedia by F. L. Rieger, a fourteen-volume work published between 1860 and 1874, but wanted to go further. For a long time Otto could not find an eligible editor-in-chief until he began to cooperate with Jan Malý, a former co-editor of the Reiger's encyclopedia, who laid down a concept of the new work with a proposed name - Czech national encyclopedia (Národní encyklopedie česká) in 1884. After Malý's death the following year, Otto found a new editor-in-chief, Tomáš Masaryk later the president of Czechoslovakia, and in 1886 the actual work began (Masaryk himself writing the psychology, sociology, philosophy and logic disciplines). The next year, Masaryk got involved in a tempestuous dispute over the authenticity of the allegedly historical Zelenohorský and Královedvorský manuscripts and resigned from the editorship. Otto managed to establish a new editorial group from prominent technicians, theologians and representatives of Czech universities. Their intensive work and the work of their collaborators lead to the publication of the first volume of the encyclopedia, under the name Ottův slovník naučný (Otto's encyclopedia), in January 1888. From that point onwards, the work progressed without major problems and volumes were published regularly until the last (28th) one appeared in 1908.

Otto's encyclopedia consists of 28 (27 regular plus one supplementary) volumes. It contains approximately 150,000 entries printed on 28,912 pages, using an estimated 130 million letters. There are nearly 5,000 images and illustrations and 479 pages of attachments in the encyclopedia. Around 55 main editors and 1,100 external collaborators participated in its creation.