History of the Encyclopædia Britannica the criteria by which the articles were sorted were not obvious even to scholars, despite Dr. Adler's claims that the sorting followed naturally from the "Propædia's" outline of all knowledge. In 1985, the "Britannica" responded to reader requests by restoring the index as a two-volume set. The number of topics indexed by the "Britannica" has fluctuated from 500,000 (1985, the same as in 1954) to 400,000 (1989,1991) to 700,000 in the current 2007 print version. Presumably, this recent increase reflects the introduction of efficient electronic indexing, since the size of the encyclopedia has remained nearly constant at approximately 40 million
Otto's encyclopedia Otto's encyclopedia Otto's encyclopedia ( or ), published at the turn of the 20th century, is the largest encyclopedia written in the Czech language. For its scope and the quality of the writing, it is comparable to the greatest world encyclopedias of its time, such as "Encyclopædia Britannica". At the beginning of the 1880s, Jan Otto, a Czech book-seller and publisher, began planning a new general Czech encyclopedia. He was inspired by the first Czech encyclopedia by F. L. Rieger, a fourteen-volume work published between 1860 and 1874, but wanted to go further. For a long time Otto could not