Well-Salted

Did we all have someone in our childhood who was The Best Giver of Presents? In my case, it was a family friend called Vere Guilford. She entered deeply enough into the person you were to get presents right. At the perfect moment she gave me a lockable cassette box. When my soul was starting to ache she gave me a double-cassette pack of Beethoven symphonies. At Christmas 1974 (I remember the mild disappointment on unwrapping it) she gave me Volume I of the twelve-volume Oxford Junior Encyclopedia.

It was the ‘Mankind’ volume of the 1974 edition, 500 pages long. With not much excitement I started to browse through this great red tome. It turned out to be more of a pleasure to browse through than the Encylopedia Britannica with its extensive articles on every single Pope – ‘articles that tell you’, as my father said, ‘more than you want to know’. The instant appeal of this ‘Mankind’ volume was that it had photographs on almost every page to accompany the prose: large black-and-white ones of varieties of human I really wanted to look at, such as a family of pygmies smoking outside their hut. I spent the rest of Christmas Day gazing at such specimens: ‘A gypsy family near Wexford, Ireland’, ‘A group of Bedouin’, ‘Hottentot women and children playing a game’. Accompanying the article on ‘Races and Peoples’ was a full page of photographs of faces: top row, ‘Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean’; middle row, ‘Negro, Mongol, American Indian’; bottom row, ‘Melanesian, Polynesian, Australian Aborigine’. The faces got wilder and the hair more unkempt the further down the page you went. I don’t think you’d be allowed nowadays to put the photos in that order. It implied some kind of hierarchy. The following Christmas the same friend gave me Volume V: ‘Great Lives’. Now I started lapping up the prose. No article is longer than 2,000 words; many are shorter, but none is pathetically short. The entries kick off with the person’s greatness in a nutshell: ‘Faraday was the discoverer of electrical induction, and therefore of man’s power to generate electricity’, but then they take you back to his or her childhood. ‘When he was five years old the Faradays moved to rooms over a coach house near Manchester Square in London; here at the age of ten Michael became an errand boy at a bookseller’s shop . . .’ That was exactly the kind of thing a young person wanted to know, to humanize the man – and that volume has been indispensable ever since for both my and my children’s history and science projects. (Wikipedia articles are useless for such projects as they tell you far more than you want to know, and you don’t even know whether you can trust them.) From then on, I collected the twelve-volume set. The ‘Law and Society’ volume took over from ‘Mankind’ as my favourite as it contained fascinating illustrations and photographs of people having a horrible time: children playing football at a bleak borstal; a slave market in West Virginia; prisoners at a treadmill; men breaking stones in a workhouse; and the Metropolitan Police arresting two suspects after a theft at a department store. The last (and least-desired) volume to be acquired was Volume VII, ‘Farming and Fisheries’. That one contained (under ‘F’) articles on Farm Animals, Farm Cottages, Farm-houses, Farming Distribution, Farm Labour, Farmstead, Farm Tools, History of, and Farm Vehicles. Unless you were a Cirencester Agricultural College-type child, this was tedious stuff. The only sentence in that volume that caught the eye was the first sentence of ‘Rubber’: ‘When the Spaniards first arrived in Mexico they found the Indians had waterproof clothes and balls which bounced.’ That is, actually, a brilliant first sentence for an article on rubber: engaging, concise, elegant and convincing. Who wrote it? All 4,030 articles across the twelve volumes are anonymous, so we don’t know, but at the beginning of each volume there’s a list of its contributors. Many seem to be dons, and most of the ones who aren’t are experts with letters after their names. There are far more male contributors than female. In ‘Great Lives’ there are 13 female contributors out of 112; ‘Farming and Fisheries’ has 6 female contributors out of a total of 84, and one of them is Lady Hart Dyke of the Lullingstone Silk Farm. The whole encyclopedia has, to me, the ‘voice’ of a benign Oxford don explaining something to his or her highly curious and intelligent 12-year-old child. Each article is so thoughtfully and clearly written, with such enthusiasm to impart its knowledge and wisdom in a readable way, that even when you read one on a subject you’re not interested in, you imagine the child for whom reading it might have been the moment that sparked a lifelong passion, be it for Soil Erosion or the Hotel Industry. Who designed this ‘voice’? Whose idea was this whole enterprise? To find out, I spent an afternoon in the library of the Oxford University Press headquarters, looking through the archive. There’s no doubt: the guiding force and guardian of the encyclopedia’s ‘voice’ was a woman called Laura E. Salt, one of its general editors (the other was Geoffrey M. Boumphrey). She had been a schoolteacher and then an HM Inspector for Education. The war years, she explained in one interview in the files, had been ‘a splendid time for broiling up ideas as we had no paper for publishing books’. The first edition appeared from 1948 to 1955 and sold well over a million copies. Miss Salt’s method was to divide the volumes into themes – so, for example, you will find ‘Japanese’ in the ‘Mankind’ volume; ‘Japan’ in ‘The Universe’; ‘Japanese Language’ in ‘Communications’, and ‘Japanese Art’ in ‘The Arts’. Arthur Mee had used a similar method with his ten-volume Children’s Encyclopædia, which he started in 1908 when the diphthong was still very much in use – and that also had a volume called ‘Great Lives’. Mee’s encyclopedia went out of print in the early 1960s and the Oxford Junior Encyclopedia, aiming at a slightly older age of child, took its place. As Laura Salt wrote, ‘Each volume develops a flavour of its own, and encourages the reader to think of knowledge in related wholes rather than in isolated snippets of information.’ This is excellent for the vital process of self-education through selective browsing; the only disadvantage is that it made it possible for a non-sciencey child never even to open (or, perhaps, even buy) the ‘Industry and Commerce’ volume, which had a picture of a power-station on the dust jacket. (That volume, I now discover, has a long article on ‘The Tobacco Industry’, written in the days before smoking was seen as a bad thing. ‘The cut tobacco,’ gushes the author, who was probably chain-smoking while writing it, ‘known as “rag”, is then passed through a heated rotary cylinder which reduces the moisture and brings out the flavour and aroma.’) Laura Salt’s other inspired idea was to commission only the very cleverest people in the country to write the articles. The lists of contributors abound with Emeritus Professors and Fellows of the Royal Society. ‘Editors’, Miss Salt explained, ‘found it was far more successful to go to first-class experts, even though these might have little experience of writing for the young. In fact, it is the really great scholar who can see through his or her subject far enough to be able to select the essentials and write simply about them.’ That is spot on, especially if you have someone as exacting as Laura Salt to edit each article and make sure every sentence of the sciencey ones is intelligible to a lay person. The result is that the Oxford Junior Encyclopedia works well as ‘a reference book for all the family’, as the reviewer for The Listener put it. But what if you needed to look something up and didn’t know which volume to look in? For that, a thirteenth volume, ‘Index and Ready Reference’, was created. If an index item is in bold type, that means there’s a whole article on it; if in roman, it’s mentioned but doesn’t have a full article. It’s fun to look at that index now and see what is and isn’t there. There’s no mention at all of Mary Seacole, for a start. There’s no full article on the Gunpowder Plot, no article on Thomas Cromwell, no mention of Chinese New Year or Diwali, and the index goes from ‘Rectum’ to ‘Red admiral butterfly’ without mentioning ‘Recycling’. The things they went on about in those days were: Telecommunications, Television Engineering, Dams, Plastics in Industry, Irrigation, Slide Rule, Soil Mechanics and Wireless Telegraphy. New subjects for the 1970s edition included Automation, Computers, Lasers, New Towns, Race Relations and Silicons. The article about computers (in the ‘Engineering’ volume) comes with the inevitable photograph of a computer the size of a large room with two lab technicians pressing buttons and turning handles. As well as the strong bias towards male contributors, there’s discernible sexism in the prose. ‘Man no longer had to live in caves; instead he camped by lakes and marshes . . .’ That prehistoric ‘he’ was to be expected in the 1970s, just as the Roman Empire, and any ship, was ‘she’. In any piece on DIY and household repairs, it’s ‘No one should attempt to repair furniture unless he is certain that he has sufficient skill and knowledge.’ For anything about domestic science, it’s ‘Some modern stoves have special features such as a glass or Perspex oven door to allow the cook to examine what she is cooking.’ The ‘Home and Health’ volume (from which both those examples are taken) is, actually, rather hard-going, with bossy articles on dressmaking divided into numbered sections. ‘The straight pieces must be exactly in line with the selvage, and the crosswise pieces on the exact cross.’ This is not the kind of thing that any child wants to look up in an encyclopedia, but I suppose it had to be there, for definitiveness’s sake. ‘Home and Health’ was the last volume to be completed, and it shows. Its editor, Winifred Davin, ‘complained bitterly’ (according to Laura Salt’s recollections) ‘that her volume was being treated as a waste-paper basket’ for unwanted subjects. But in general, Oxford Junior Encyclopedia pieces are the opposite of dull. Their writers believe in the romance of facts. Compare and contrast the gentle breaking of the news (in the OJE) that the expression ‘cave man’ is ‘now rather meaningless and misleading’, with Wikipedia’s instant killing off of the whole romantic concept: ‘A caveman is a stock character based upon widespread but anachronistic and conflated concepts of the way in which neanderthals or early modern humans may have looked and behaved.’ OJE contributors would never have been as brutal as that; nor would such a heart-sinkingly soulless sentence have been allowed into print by the great Laura Salt – who, the OUP archivist told me, died in 1983 (‘her staff obituary does not mention any surviving family’). The Oxford Junior Encyclopedia was replaced in the 1990s by the nine-volume Oxford Children’s Encyclopedia, a different entity entirely. We did buy one for our children but it was never loved. It comes in a blue glossy box and is alphabetical: the volumes go ‘Aborigines to Candles’, ‘Cannibalism to Egypt’ and so on. The only nod to the Salt method is that there’s still a separate volume called ‘Biography’ (no longer ‘Great Lives’). But the pieces are half the length, so there’s no longer any mention of the Faradays moving to rooms over a coach house near Manchester Square when Michael was 5. The abbreviation ‘q.v.’, ubiquitous in the OJE, has been replaced with ‘Find out more’. There’s no question: it’s dumbed down. And, worse, the information has been deromanticized, textbook diagrams replacing those brilliantly chosen photographs. It was reprinted in 2004; but now even that is going to be discontinued, as young people now look everything up online. You just try helping your child to do a project on King John with nothing but the choice between a Wikipedia information torrent and a BBC bitesize article in a jaunty font.

 Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 56 © Ysenda Maxtone Graham 2017