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
Collier's Encyclopedia Collier's Encyclopedia Collier's Encyclopedia (full title: Collier's Encyclopedia with Bibliography and Index) was a United States-based general encyclopedia published by Crowell, Collier and Macmillan. Self-described in its preface as "a scholarly, systematic, continuously revised summary of the knowledge that is most significant to mankind", it was long considered one of the three major contemporary English-language general encyclopedias, together with "Encyclopedia Americana" and "Encyclopædia Britannica": the three were sometimes collectively called "the ABCs". P.F. Collier & Son Company first published "Chandler's Encyclopedia: An Epitome of Human Knowledge" with chemist William Henry Chandler as editor-in-chief as early as 1898. The edition of