Review: All the Knowledge in the World

The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia – From Ancient Greece to Wikipedia: Revealing Britannica, Einstein, and the Human Quest

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All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia – From Ancient Greece to Wikipedia: Revealing Britannica, Einstein, and the Human Quest by Simon Garfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It may appear, albeit fleetingly, as if Wells—like Paul Otlet before him—was planning the Internet. Or rather the ideal Internet, a force for intellectual good, guided only by the principled. He was closer, perhaps, to Wikipedia, and closer still to a child's view of the world, with a child's eternal optimism, and a masterfully naive solution to all our great dilemmas.

We have always strived for accessable, broad information, even if that accessibility has been horrifically inaccessible for large swaths of time and still largely remains so. But it is in striving to be better (to be more accurate, to be more easily reached, to be more interconnected with other topics) that we find the history of the Encyclopedia, in all of it's forms.

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