Vickipedia

Several years ago, my wife gave me this wonderful set of encyclopedia, written in the UK in 1874 and printed in New York in 1888. I’ll try to post about one entry per weekday here, and if you have any requests - general or specific - don’t hesitate to ask. In the absence of special requests, I generally look for entries that are informative about the era, amusing in their anachronism, have interesting illustrations, or otherwise strike my fancy.

A note on editing and formatting: These entries are OCRed from scanned pages. I try to correct all the OCR errors but I’m no editor and I’m sure a few get through in each entry. If they bother you, point them out and I’ll fix them. Formatting - while I will make basic efforts to preserve the formatting of the original entries (e.g. an illustration centered in the original will be centered here), I am not being fanatical about it: line breaks and columns are not being preserved. If you’d like to see the original b&w scan page, let me know and I can email it to you.