Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana
The Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana (also called Enciclopedia Espasa, or Enciclopedia Espasa-Calpe, after its publisher) is a Spanish encyclopedia comprising 72 volumes (numbered from 1 to 70, with parts 18 and 28 consisting of two volumes each) published from 1908 to 1930 plus a ten-volume appendix published 1930-1933. Between 1935 and 2002, 34 supplemental volumes were published plus an index, another A-Z appendix, and an atlas, for a total of 119 volumes. Each of the volumes vary in length.
Robert Collison regards the Espasa as one of the greatest encyclopedias, along with the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition and the Enciclopedia Italiana (p. 147). "This work is remarkable for its detail: maps and plans of even remote and obscure places; reproductions and descriptions of works of art entered under their titles; lengthy bibliographies, international in scope; full dictionary treatment of individual words with, in many cases, foreign equivalents; and usually affording full scope to lengthy treatment of important subjects." (201) The authors of the work, as an example of its scope, mentioned in the preface (vii) that all biological genera known at the time were covered in the work.
Editors of the work had a library of more than 10,000 volumes to consult. For the printing, they relied on the most modern machines. They had eight presses driven by electromotor and manned by 150 workers. Unlike most encyclopedia publishers, they admitted in the preface (p. vii) that they consulted other (in fact, “todos”—all) other dictionaries and encyclopedias in Spanish, French, English, Italian, German, Chinese, and Japanese from the time when writing the Espasa. Besides the editing staff, there were 200 permanent writers, and more than 400 who had wrote one or more articles. There were numerous cartographers, draftsman, and drawers, as well (Enciclopedia 38).
The aim of the publishers was to produce an encyclopedia reference book in Spanish that covered scientific and technological knowledge as well as history, biographies, geography, arts, and the literature of Spain and Latin America.
According to calculations made by its publishers, the encyclopaedia has more than 165,000 pages and 200 million words. The 82-volume version is also estimated to have over 1,000,000 articles (Kister 450).
Only minor revisions have been made to the original volumes, such as the rewrite of a part of the 1910 "bicicleta" article which had enumerated a "pistol or revolver" as one of the things to be taken on a bicycle tour.
In 2003 a repackaged version was published in 90 volumes, consisting of the original 82 volumes plus a new 8-volume "Complemento Enciclopédico 1934-2002" providing up-to-date information in alphabetical order. The old supplements will no longer be republished.
External links
- Template:Es icon http://www.espasa.com/nuevaweb/frames_enciclopedia.htm Homepage for the Enciclopedia universal
References
- Template:Es icon http://www.libroantiguo.org/obr/euiea.htm
- Template:Es icon Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana, "Espasa," vol. 22 (1958)
- Robert Collison, Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout The Ages, London, Hafner Publishing, 1966 (second edition).
- Kenneth F. Kister, Kister's best encyclopedias: a comparative guide to general and specialized encyclopedias, 2nd ed. (Phoenix: 1994).