How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [87]
Many people use a dictionary to find out how to spell and pronounce words. The analogous employment of an encyclopedia is to use it only to look up dates and places and other such simple facts. But this is to under-use, or misuse, an encyclopedia. Like dictionaries, such works are educational as well as informational tools. A glance at their history will confirm this.
Though the word "encyclopedia" is Greek, the Greeks had no encyclopedia, and for the same reason that they had no dictionary. The word meant to them not a book about knowledge, a book in which knowledge reposed, but knowledge itself-all the knowledge that an educated man should have.
It was again the Romans who first found encyclopedias necessary; the oldest extant example is that of Pliny.
Interestingly enough, the first alphabetically-arranged en-Aids to Reading 183
cyclopedia did not appear until about 1700. Most of the great encyclopedias since then have been alphabetical. It is the easiest of all arrangements, and it made possible great strides in encyclopedia-making.
Encyclopedias present a different problem from wordbooks. An alphabetical arrangement is natural for a dictionary.
But is the world, which is the subject matter of an encyclopedia, arranged alphabetically? Obviously not. Well then, how is the world arranged and ordered? This comes down to asking how knowledge is ordered.
The ordering of knowledge has changed with the centuries. All knowledge was once ordered in relation to the seven liberal arts-grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the trivium; arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, the quadrivium.
Medieval encylopedias reflected this arrangement. Since the universities were arranged according to the same system, and students studied according to it also, the arrangement was useful in education.
The modern university is very different from the medieval one, and the change is reflected in modern encyclopedias. The knowledge that they report is divided up in fiefs, or specialties, that are roughly equivalent to the various departments of the university. But this arrangement, although it forms the backbone structure of an encyclopedia, is masked by the alphabetical arrangement of the material.
It is this infra-structure-to take a term from the sociologists
-that the good reader and user of an encyclopedia will seek to discover. It is true that it is primarily factual information that he wants from his set. But he should not be content with facts in isolation. The encyclopedia presents him with an arrangement of facts-facts in relation to other facts. The understanding, as contrasted with the mere information, that an encylopedia can provide depends on the recognition of such relations.
In an alphabetically-arranged encyclopedia, these relations are to a large extent obscured. In a topically-arranged encyclo-184 HOW TO READ A BOOK
pedia, they are, of course, highlighted. But topical encyclopedias have many disadvantages, among them the fact that most readers are not accustomed to using them. Ideally, the best encyclopedia would be one that had both a topical and an alphabetical arrangement. Its presentation of material in the form of separate articles would be alphabetical, but it would also contain some kind of topical key or outline-essentially, a table of contents. ( A table of contents is a topical arrangement of a book, as opposed to an index, which is an alphabetical arrangement. ) As far as we know, there is no such encyclopedia on the market today, but it would be worth the effort to try to make one.
In default of the ideal, the reader must fall back on the help and advice provided him by an encyclopedia's editors.
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