The New Encyclopaedia Britannica Book

The 14th edition took three years to complete, at the then exorbitant cost of $2.5 million dollars, all of it invested by Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck & Company. It was very different to the 11th edition, having fewer volumes & simpler articles, continuing the business strategy of popularizing the Britannica for the American mass market at the expense of its scholarship. The 14th edition also drew criticism for deleting information unflattering to the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the 14th also included many illustrious contributors, including eighteen Nobel laureates in science, such as Robert Millikan, Albert Abraham Michelson & Arthur Compton. More coverage was given to popular entertainment, with Gene Tunney writing on boxing, Lillian Gish on acting & Irene Castle on ballroom dancing. George Bernard Shaw contributed a well-regarded article on socialism. In all, there were roughly 3500 named contributors, of which roughly half were American. The 14th edition was again criticized for sexism; for example, less than 6% of its 13,000 biographies were of women. The 14th edition was published in September 1929, and had 23 volumes with a one-volume Index that also contained a complete atlas. Unfortunately, the Great Depression struck scarcely a month after the release of the 14th edition, & sales plummeted. Despite the unfailing support of the Sears Roebuck company, the Britannica almost went bankrupt over the next few years. Rosenwald died in 1932, & General Robert E. Wood took over; Cox was removed as publisher & the Secretary-Treasurer of Sears, Elkan Harrison Powell was installed as the new President of the Britannica. E. H. Powell identified and fixed a key vulnerability of Britannica, namely, that its sales & income fluctuated strongly over the life-cycle of an edition. After the release of a new edition, sales would generally begin strong, & decline gradually for 10-20 years as the edition began to "show its age"; finally, sales would drop off precipitously with the announcement that work had begun on a new edition, since few people would buy an obsolete encyclopedia that would soon be updated. These strong fluctuations in sales led to economic hardship for the Britannica. To amend this problem, Powell suggested in 1933 the policy of continuous revision, with the goal of keeping the Britannica "always timely & always salable". The basic idea was to maintain a continuous editorial staff that would constantly revise the articles on a fixed schedule. Earlier encyclopedias did not maintain a continuous editorial staff, but rather assembled one just prior to beginning a new edition. Rather than releasing supplemental editions or volumes, new printings would be made every year with only enough copies made to cover the sales for that year. An analysis of the Britannica's articles suggested that roughly 75% required only occasional revising, whereas 25% required revision every 1-3 years. The articles were therefore divided into 30 classifications & a schedule for their revision worked out, such that every article would be checked at least twice a decade.