Beautiful certificate from the Encyclopedia Americana Corporation
issued in 1915. This historic document has an
ornate border around it with a vignette of an eagle. This item has the signatures of the Company's President and Secretary and is over 91 years old.
The Encyclopædia Americana is a popular dictionary of arts, sciences, literature, history, politics and biography, brought down to the present time; including a copious collection of original articles in American biography; on the basis of the 7th ed. of the German Conversations-Lexicon was founded by German-born Francis Lieber. It was the first significant American encyclopedia and was based on Brockhaus' Conversations-Lexikon. Like that work, it was written in an accessible style and intended for general (rather than scholarly) use.
The first edition comprised 13 volumes and was published between 1829 and 1833 by Carey, Lea & Carey of Philadelphia; in 1846, a supplementary fourteenth volume was issued. Later editions and reprints were published through 1858. , and modeled on the accessible style of Brockhaus' Conversations-Lexikon.
In 1902, a new version in 16 volumes which carried over some of the old material was published under the title Encyclopedia Americana, under the editorial supervision of Scientific American magazine. The magazine's editor, Frederick Converse Beach, was editor-in-chief, and was said to be "assisted by more than one thousand of the most eminent scholars and authorities in America." The first publisher was R.S. Peale & Co; between 1903 and 1906 further editions were issued by the Americana Co. and the Scientific American Compiling Department. The relationship with Scientific American was terminated in 1911. From 1907 to 1912, it was published as The Americana.
A major new edition of the Encyclopedia Americana appeared in 1918-20 in 30 volumes, and it has been regularly revised since. An Annual or Yearbook was also published annually from 1923 until 2000.
The encyclopedia was purchased by Grolier in 1945.
In the year 2004, the 175th anniversary edition has 45,000 articles containing 25 million words and was written by 6,500 contributors. It includes 9,000 bibliographies, 150,000 cross-references, 1,000+ tables, 1,200 maps, and almost 4,500 black-and-white line art and color images. It also has 680 factboxes.
Currently, the encyclopedia is produced by Scholastic Library Publishing, a division of Scholastic Inc and Grolier Inc. An online version, requiring subscription, was introduced in 1997.