Simon Garfield’s remarkable new book is about encyclopedias. That sounds boring, and sometimes is, although he does his best to make it engrossing. In the early pages he describes how he toured the home counties by car, buying up copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Their owners are only too willing to part with them for, as the blurb of Garfield’s book reminds us, in the 1920s and 1930s an army of persuasive door-to-door salesmen vended their wares to guilt-ridden and upwardly mobile middle-class parents who feared that without these mighty tomes their children would fall behind at school.
In fact, the 11th edition serves a purpose that Garfield does not mention. It is a time machine. Its pictures and descriptions of cities and countries show a world that two world wars have swept away. Here, preserved in photographs and tiny print are Joseph Conrad’s Africa, Marcel Proust’s France and the Germany of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. That may be one reason why my father, who fought in the First World War and lived in France for much of the 1930s, valued it.
