Page 1 Advertisements Column 3

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 222, 18 March 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

It Is Easy To Handle. < Among the important novelties which characterise the new Encyclopaedia Britannica, a high place must be given to a revolutionary improvement in its manufacture, which has made it as easy to handle as an ordinary novel. In its special impression on India paper —a very thin but opaque paper which has hitherto been used chiefly for printing expensive Bibles—the volumes are reduced to one third of the weight and thickness of the impression 011 ordinary book paper. Instead of the heavy and cumbrous volumes assQciated with the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the past, the new edition is now to be bought in slender volumes which' can be read with ease in an armchair. The. binding is so devised that a volume can be folded back, cover to cover, without injury, arid held in one hand as comfortably as a magazine. The illustration on this page shows the India paper volumes in use, and will convey a better idea of their convenience than any words can give. Out of the first 35,000 purchasers about 90 per cent. —practically all the private buyers—selected this style. It costs only a trifle more than the impression on ordinary paper, and no one who has once used it will be content with the usual cumbrous style of reference book in future. Further, the ease with which these light and. slender volumes may be handled will encourage the purchaser —and his family— to take them up for recreative reading, and so to associate at first hand with the leading minds of the 20th century. It Is . Easy To Consult. Whilst the India paper format of the hew Encyclopaedia Britannica makes its volumes easy to read, the carefully considered arrangement of the contents makes them easy to consult. Whatever question arises in the reader's mind can be answered by their help with the minimum waste of time. The plan of this 11th edition has been enlarged to include a far greater number of short articles than were previously to be found in the work ; the last complete edition had only 16,000 headings, as against 40,000 in the present edition. These short articles chiefly deal with questions of detail, previously merged and hidden from the hasty enquirer in the discussion of a main subject to which they were treated as incidentals. Thus the agricultural reader will find separate articles on such subjects as irrigation, drainage, manures, threshing or ploughing; liquor laws, labour legislation, strikes, are treated under these headings and not in a long article on economics. Where a question is too minute to be answered in a separate article, the admirable index of 500,000 references comes into play. Thus the Encyclopaedia Britannica, long acknowledged to be tiie most comprehensive and trustworthy of encyclopaedias, has now also been ipade the easiest for prompt reference—