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
Domestic Encyclopedia Domestic Encyclopedia The Domestic Encyclopedia is a small encyclopedia of the English language, in four volumes, published in London in 1802 by Murray and Highly, and compiled by Anthony Florian Madinger Willich. While most encyclopedias of the time, such as "Encyclopædia Britannica", were printed in quarto, or in the case of Chambers "Cyclopædia", even folio, the "Domestic Encyclopedia" was printed in octavo, 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 inches. There are roughly 500 pages per volume, and 28 plates in total. Volume 4 includes a 70-page supplement and a 33-page index. The subject matter of the encyclopedia centers around domestic and