Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Encyclopaedia Britannica. A typical product of the Enlightenment, when there was a vast amount of new knowledge to be disseminated and a rapidly growing reading public. It was a riposte to the French Encyclopédie and was published in three volumes between 1768 and 1771 by a consortium of Edinburgh printers, Andrew Bell, Colin Macfarquhar, and William Smellie. The sequence was alphabetical and the articles lengthy. It is now in its 15th edition (1992).

J. A. Cannon

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