The Encyclopædia Britannica is 246 years old today, marking nearly a quarter of a millennium since the first volume of the first edition was published in Edinburgh, Scotland, on December 6, 1768. The first edition was published in three volumes. For around 7 pence, readers could buy the first volume. The subsequent volumes were released in weekly editions through 1771 for a total price of 12 pounds. With editor Andrew Smellie arranging the articles, the first edition sold 3,000 copies.

The Britannica grew in subsequent editions, expanding to 10 volumes for the second edition and 20 volumes for the fourth edition. Its final print edition in 2010 had ballooned to 32 volumes. Its authors have ranged from Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan to Bill Clinton and Desmond Tutu.

The Britannica switched hands over the years, with control switching from Scottish publishers to American businesses. Sears Roebuck and the University of Chicago both controlled the Britannica in the first half of the 20th century. Its ambition and focus also changed. American publishers shortened articles (some of the first edition’s entries were over three pages long) in an attempt to make the Britannica accessible to a mass audience, an audience they recruited an army of salesmen to target through door-to-door sales.

The Britannica also expanded its stated aims, from being a quality education and reference tool to systematically organizing all human knowledge…no mean feat, even for the more than 18,000 pages the 2010 edition contained. One Persian Shah was given a copy of the 3rd edition after he assumed power in 1797. After reading the entire edition, he added “Master of the Encyclopædia Britannica” to his title.

In 2012, the Britannica abandoned print and switched to exclusively online publishing. Its prestige has faded somewhat as online resources like Wikipedia have assembled far more knowledge than the Britannica could have ever hoped to summarize in print. (Wikipedia has 4.6 million articles, a figure I found on Wikipedia. At least four of them are devoted to the 1980s cartoon “ThunderCats.”) Still, as it approaches 250 years of publication, the Britannica is the oldest English-language encyclopedia still being produced. It also hasn’t entirely been put to pasture by the internet. If you go to its current online version, you’ll find a two-page article on Wikipedia.

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