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
History of the Encyclopædia Britannica an organization that likely inspired the "new plan" of the "Britannica". The first encyclopedia to include biographies of living people was the 64-volume "Grosses Universal-Lexicon" (published 1732–1759) of Johann Heinrich Zedler, who argued that death alone should not render people notable. The "Britannica" was the idea of Colin Macfarquhar, a bookseller and printer, and Andrew Bell, an engraver, both of Edinburgh. They conceived of the "Britannica" as a conservative reaction to the French "Encyclopédie" of Denis Diderot (published 1751–1766), which was widely viewed as heretical. Ironically, the "Encyclopédie" had begun as a French translation of the popular English encyclopedia, "Cyclopaedia"