Ten years later, around 2,000 salesmen were selling the Britannica door to door, on a commission of between $500 and $600 per sale. Though they were occasionally sighted on Britain's suburban streets until the 1990s, the largest fleet of Britannica salesmen was in the US, where the encyclopedia was first marketed in the 1790s the company's headquarters moved there in the 1920s. According to a 2006 report by Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Britannica's own market research showed that the typical encyclopedia owner opened the books just once or twice a year. The website is continuously updated, it's much more expansive and it has multimedia."Įxpansive it may be, but the Britannica website is not, as the encyclopedia sets once were, flogged door to door by enterprising salesmen – and they were almost always men – with a neat line in charming householders into parting with a large amount of cash for books that they would in many cases never read. "Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it," Cauz said. On Tuesday, Jorge Cauz, president of the Chicago-based Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc, announced that, 244 years since it was first compiled and printed in Edinburgh, the encyclopedia will no longer be produced in book form. Anything I wanted to know – the circumference of the globe, say, or the migratory habits of Canada geese – my grandfather would look for in there, his prized set of Encyclopedia Britannica.īut such a memory will, from now on, remain just that.
I remember them well: those heavy black books with their glossy gold lettering, all 32 of them, occupying their own special bookcase in the corner of my grandparents' living room.