(2 of 2)
Historical Impact. World Book's editors show the keenest appreciation of the readers' thirst for recent history, devoting 21 pages to the assassination and funeral of John F. Kennedy. Compton's has five well-turned and candid ("The President, shot through the head and throat, slumped over into his wife's lap") paragraphs. Britannica jams a sentence about the shooting into the same paragraph with Kennedy's 1963 proposals for an income tax cut and civil rights bill. Book of Knowledge handles it all in one short paragraph.
All the books pride themselves on being as up to date as possible. Compton's started the practice of annual revisions in 1922, this year has added 50 articles. World Book spent $1,000,000 to add 258 pages and change 4,000 others. Britannica rewrote 118 of its 4,103 articles, added 45, updated 582. Book of Knowledge, which ought to be most current, surprisingly fails to mention the first human space walk, that of Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov in March 1965, in its article on space. World Book and Compton's also issue fast-selling supplementary yearbooks on recent events at $5.95 each, and Book of Knowledge plans to begin one next year.
Left-Handed Articles. All except World Book now follow Compton's lead and include an index of facts about people, places and things not rating a full article. Unlike the other two encyclopedias, Book of Knowledge and World Book also have running cross references between articles. Book of Knowledge is strong on such how-to-do-it articles as growing penicillium molds and making a farm for earthworms.
The four encyclopedias rely heavily on outside experts either to write or review articles, but not all of these authorities recall just what they actually did. "I dash these things off with my left hand," confides one. Book of Knowledge allows Hairdresser Mr. Kenneth to propagandize: "Although it is expensive to go to a fine hairdresser, it is well worth it, even if your visit is only once or twice a year, for you will get the perfect haircut or new hair style that will keep you looking attractive for a long time." Conductor Leonard Bernstein, on the other hand, engagingly uses a conversational style: "Now, perhaps, our man is ready to conduct . . . No—wait. He still has not considered . . ." Most of the experts are heavily rewritten. In 20 years at Compton's, says its editor in chief Donald E. Lawson, "I have found only two experts whose material we were able to use just about as it was—most know how to write for their peers, but they cannot write for young people."
No matter how carefully they check and recheck articles for accuracy, some strange errors inevitably sneak in. "Asia extends from the Ural Mountains in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west," says the Book of Knowledge. Even so, it is an exciting new contestant in one of publishing's most competitive fields, and its maps clearly place Asia right where Asia really is.