Customer Reviews

Britannica First Edition Replica Set (3 vol.)

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There's a wonderful episode in series three of Blackadder in which, for reasons I cannot quite remember, Baldric and Blackadder work through the night to recreate Dr Johnson's dictionary. I think they get as 'Aardvark'.

There's a sense of too much effort being invested up-front in this first edition of the Encyclopaedia. The three equally-sized volumes cover A-B, C-L and M-Z. The volumes were written and published a few years apart, and you can imagine the editorial meeting in 1768 when they realised that they had only cover A to B. Would they continue at the same pace, and possibly not live to see a final XYZ volume published? (What would their wives say?!) Or would they rush the rest, and hope that no-one noticed the imbalance?

Well, now we can enjoy the imbalance. A word of warning: you need to get used to the archaic form of the letter 's', which looks like an 'f' except at the end of a word or when in uppercase. Thus we get phrases like 'notwithftanding thefe difadvantages' and conceivably 'fuppofing Pope's Iliad to be fhit'.

The reproduction of the three volumes has been done on a photographic basis, using an aged edition. Thus you'll buying a pristine photocopy of someone's original, as it is now, splodges and all. As others have noted, the binding is not real leather, but this doesn't bother me. Each volume is surprisingly light, given that you're getting around 1,000 pages per book. And that includes a number of fold-out tables.
The content is particularly Scottish, by the way, although there is no harm in that. Thus if you look up 'Law', there's almost nothing on the law of England and Wales, yet the editor appears to have filled countless pages with the full text of every Scottish statute in operation at the time.

As you might expect, this is not the first encyclopaedia to buy if you're looking for something to help your kids through GCSEs. I suspect that, 250 years on, over half the entries are incorrect or at least out of kilter with today's understanding of the world. But it's a fascinating thing to browse through.

Very happy with the purchase.It was a father's day gift and my husband loves it. I wish it would have arrived in a plain brown box because it was in the publisher's box and my husband saw it when arrived. Butthe price and the package was great,brand new as well.fast shipping.thank you