All the Knowledge in the World

The encyclopaedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Created by thousands of scholars and the most obsessive of editors, adults cleared their shelves in the belief that wisdom was now effortlessly accessible in their living rooms. Contributions from Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Orville Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, Marie Curie and Indira Gandhi helped millions of children with their homework. But now these huge books gather dust and sell for almost nothing on eBay, and we derive our information from the internet, apparently for free. What have we lost in this transition? And how did we tell the progress of our lives in the past? All the Knowledge in the World is a history and celebration of those who created the most ground-breaking and remarkable publishing phenomenon of any age. It tracks the story from Ancient Greece to Wikipedia, from modest single-volumes to the 11,000-volume Chinese manuscript that was too big to print. It looks at how Encyclopaedia Britannica came to dominate the industry and how an army of ingenious door-to-door salesmen sold their wares to guilt-ridden parents. It explains how encyclopaedias have reflected our changing attitudes towards sexuality, race and technology, and exposes how these ultimate bastions of trust were often riddled with errors and prejudice. With his characteristic ability to tackle the broadest of subjects in an illuminating and highly entertaining way, Simon Garfield uncovers a fascinating and important part of our past, and wonders whether the promise of complete knowledge - that most human of ambitions - will forever be beyond our grasp.

Witty and geekily eclectic . . . celebrates encyclopaedias in all their quirky, leatherbound glory, Simon Garfield's history of the encyclopaedia is full of jawdropping facts, and he turns what might have been a dry subject into an enjoyable, quirky, highly informative tour . . . fascinating, A delightful romp through the history of trying to summarise all there is to be known. Simon Garfield displays his inimitable mix of curiosity, learnedness and wit, Remarkable . . . engrossing. It is impossible to give readers an impression of the scope and power of Garfield's knowledge and imagination, An erudite and amusing exploration of the human quest for knowledge

Simon Garfield is the author of the international bestsellers JUST MY TYPE, ON THE MAP and MAUVE, while TO THE LETTER was one of the inspirations for the theatre shows Letters Live with Benedict Cumberbatch. His study of AIDS in Britain, THE END OF INNOCENCE, won the Somerset Maugham prize.