Eleventh Edition Encyclopedia

Published in volumes from 1910 to 1911, Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition was a work that was full of controversy. It was written when it was transitioning from a British to an American publication. In an attempt to make the work more popular, it would appear that a number of changes were made to the content. It had an unprecedented number of women contributors – 200. Most of the entries were written by journalists, British Museum scholars and other scholars; some 1500 of them, many of whom are still regarded as experts in their fields.

Some entries clearly included the opinions of the authors. Many criticized the edition for those “unpopular” and inaccurate views. It was written in a time of peace and optimism before the horrors of World War I, the Depression and World War II would take place. It is considered a scholar’s encyclopedia and is said to have influenced many similar sorts of publications since. I’ve even seen some online chatter that Wikipedia relied heavily upon the 11th edition for it’s construction and even many of the entries.

What matters most, to us anyway, is that all of the wonderful illustrations, diagrams and maps are now in the public domain. It will take more than a little time and effort to find them and find those scans of the text which offer the best possible version of each of the images.

With 35 volumes, I doubt that Reusable Art will ever be home to every image available, but, I hope that many of the most interesting ones will make their way to this site.

A side note, I did see a lot of discussion about the name of this encyclopedia being under trademark protection. Even just using the first two letters in combination is thought to be protected. For our purposes, it doesn’t really matter what we call this work, so I’m going to mainly refer to it as the 11th edition or the 1911 Encyclopedia. Seems like something silly to worry about but when I see contributors of the Australia Wikipedia greatly concerned about how to refer to this work in light of the trademark, I would rather err on the side of caution.

NOW…

On to the images!