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Everything Explained That Is Explainable!

Audiobook
Nonfiction: History/ Reference/ Encyclopedias
Unabridged   13.5 hour(s)
Publication date: 06/07/2016

Everything Explained That Is Explainable!

The Creation of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Celebrated Eleventh Edition 1910-1911

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Audio CD ISBN:9781681681702
Digital Download ISBN:9781681681719

Summary

The audacious, improbable tale of how twentieth-century American hucksterism, outlandish daring, and vision resurrected a dying Encyclopedia Britannica. The Britannica's astonishing success changed newspaper and reference book publishing and resulted in the beloved eleventh edition.

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Product Description

In Everything Explained That is Explainable, Denis Boyles tells the story of the American, entrepreneur, Horace Everett Hooper, a natural-born salesman who found an outdated set of reference books in a warehouse and sold them as "one-shelf libraries." His Western Book and Stationary Co. became one of the largest publishers in the Midwest, selling books directly to readers, and forging a business model that was forever after emulated.

Hooper and his partner, William Montgomery Jackson, along with Henry Haxton, took an outdated, unmarketable edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica to the then struggling London Times and developed revolutionary new ways to increase the paper's readership, saving both publishing institutions from financial ruin.

In a frenzy of editorial effort and fanatical conviction, the eleventh edition was put together as staffers raced against the clock to compile the 40,000 entries by 1,500 contributors. And then we see how it all fell apart, wrecked by a new owner of the Times and a disastrous courtroom fight between Jackson and Hooper—before it miraculously came together at the very last minute, saved by the unlikeliest of rescuers—Cambridge University Press.

Author Bio

Denis Boyles is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, travel, humor, essays, and criticism. He is a veteran magazine editor, and currently the co-editor of The Fortnightly Review. Boyles teaches journalism and political science at l'Institut Catholique d'Études Supérieures in La Roche sur Yon, France.