Remora

Dostoevsky said that you could measure the degree of humanity of a civilization by its prisons. Limited Inc would like to suggest that you can measure the degree of literacy of a civilization by
its encyclopedias. If this is the case, the race is on and it looks bad for our culture. Right now, ancien regime France and Edwardian England come in at about no. 1 and no. 2, while contemporary American culture, despite its micro Britannicas and its multi-media Funk and Wagnalls, is back there with the melange of misinformation and rumor Isadore of Seville put together around 800. This isn�t good.

So you can, perhaps, understand Limited Inc.�s joy when we went to the On-Line book page, to
see what was new, and found a link to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Joy turned to ecstasy
as we went to the link and behold, it worked! (which does add points, admittedly, to our culture).

A few days ago, Limited Inc was corresponding with a friend, and trying to press this friend
to go to the site -- Limited Inc has a used car salesman�s view about pressing our site upon people. And the friend asked, reasonably, what was this site about? Like, was it a personal diary? Limited Inc, horrified at the thought, explained that the idea goes back to the New Yorker�s Talk of the Town � little quasi personal, quasi journalistic pieces. Well, the Encyclopedia Britannica,
1911, unlikely as this may seem, is to us as the madeleine was to Proust � it unlocks every memory.

Here�s why. When Limited Inc was a mere stripling, a dewy suburban lad, there was a woman across the street, a Mrs. Brooks, who was, to the dewy lads dewy eyes, an ancient woman. Now,
of course, being closer in age to Mrs. Brooks than I ever thought possible, I estimate she was in her late fifties, early sixties. Like her, I'm getting ropy and rheumy -- although unlike her, I have no interest in what hymns are sung at my funeral. This was a constant obsession, as I remember. Her husband, Doctor Brooks, died, and Mrs. Brooks gave me his 1911 encyclopedia.

Probably no gift in my life has been as significant as that encyclopedia. It crashed like a meteor
into my suburban Atlanta habitus, one that had been bounded, on the one side, by Life magazine, and on the other side, by my parents native Republican Party mores. And then I get these blue-ish volumes, speckled with some gross mold, and it was well, Alice�s wonderland. I got my stock of cultural capital from going unsystematically through those books -- much more than I got from, say,
going to Tulane, later on.
By common consent, or maybe not common -- Borges says something close to this, and so does LI, so it is authorative around here - the 1911 encyclopedia was the greatest collective product of the British Empire. The Empire, which has lately become the object of much imperialist nostalgia on the part of the Weekly Standard crowd, was, let's face it, an organized crime against humanity, a much more successful theft than any mounted by the Mafia. Add up the casualties, throw in that nasty business of the opium trade, and it rather disturbs Rudyard Kipling hour in the bungalow, in spite of the Bushypoo nostalgia for the white man�s burden.

So what makes this encyclopedia worth the encomiums I�m lavishing here? The only way to understand it is to sample. So here is a comparison. LI went to another encyclopedia site, at Bartleby, picking a random entry � Quevado � and then picked that entry in the wondrous �11. Go down to the next post, where have put our excerpts. They are too long for one post.