February 28, 2003

Whatever Happened to Encyclopedic Style?

By ROBERT McHENRY

For a few years, I was editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. My term of office fell in a period of relative quiet, at least in editorial matters. We, my fellow editors and I, were not planning or producing a new edition. The last new edition, the 15th, had been published in 1974, and, for the next quarter-century, most editorial effort went into the review and revision of standing articles and the addition of such new articles as the pace of events and scholarship seemed to require. This