Du Bois, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, and Harry Houdini. Within three years, ownership reverted to the widow and brother-in-law of the previous publisher, who set about publishing a supplement to the current edition that included such famed contributors as Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, W. Sears head and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald saved the Britannica from financial difficulties twice. Two years after the end of the war, in 1920, Sears bought the rights outright to save Britannica from bankruptcy the Encyclopaedia’s mission of disseminating knowledge fit in with the philanthropic beliefs of Sears’s head, Julius Rosenwald, who also founded the Museum of Science and Industry and helped establish schools for African American children in the South. started to sell the volumes through its extensive mail-order retail network. The city’s involvement with the Encyclopaedia began during World War I, when the Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck & Co.
Beyond its acclaimed institutions of higher learning, their libraries and presses, and its museums, the city is also home to the respected Newberry Library, the American Library Association, the Great Books Foundation, and two of the most popular encyclopedias of the last few centuries: World Book, which celebrated its one hundredth anniversary last year, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which published its first volume 250 years ago.Īlthough the Britannica is now completely digital and has been supplanted by Wikipedia as the world’s go-to source for information, it was once a revered reference and proud emblem of the American middle class – and its success as an aspirational status symbol was in many ways a result of Chicago figures and institutions. Like a library, Chicago quietly houses some of the greatest sources of the world’s knowledge.
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