Stranded Encyclopedias, 1700-2000: Exploring Unfinished, Unpublished, Unsuccessful Encyclopedic Projects

In Stranded Encyclopedias, 1700–2000: Exploring Unfinished, Unpublished, Unsuccessful Encyclopedic Projects, fourteen scholars turn to the archives to challenge the way the history of modern encyclopedism has long been told. Rather than emphasizing successful publications and famous compilers, they explore encyclopedic enterprises that somehow failed. With a combined attention to script, print, and digital cultures, the volume highlights the many challenges facing those who have pursued complete knowledge in the past three hundred years. By introducing the concepts of stranded and strandedness, it also provides an analytical framework for approaching aspects often overlooked in histories of encyclopedias, books, and learning: the unpublished, the unfinished, the incomplete, the unsuccessfully disseminated, and the no-longer-updated. By examining these aspects in a new and original way, this book will be of value to anyone interested in the history of encyclopedism and lexicography, the history of knowledge, language, and ideas, and the history of books, writing, translating, and publishing.

Chapters 1 and 4 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Linn Holmberg is a Pro Futura Scientia fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden, and a researcher and teacher in History of Science and Ideas at Stockholm University, Sweden. She is the author of the award-winning dissertation The Forgotten Encyclopedia (2014) and the book The Maurists’ Unfinished Encyclopedia (2017).

Maria Simonsen is a senior researcher and teacher in Book History and History of Knowledge at Aalborg University, Denmark. She has published widely on the history of Scandinavian encyclopedias and is the author of the award-winning Den skandinaviske encyklopædi (2016).