Full tan calf binding by Bickers & Son, London. Tan marbled end papers with matching all edges. Gilt Freeman’s Orphan School emblem on front board with  gilt line edging. Red and green title plates with gilt banding, lettering and ornate decoration on the spine.

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Ephraim Chambers (c.1680-1740)

Apprenticed to a London cartographer, ‘was seized by the idea that Harris’s Lexicon needed bringing up to date and that he was the man to do this work so seemingly disproportionate to any single person’s experience’. A good French scholar, he adapted Moreri and Bayle to the common-sense climate of the English Enlightenment. Moreover, he introduced a novel device that has proved indispensable to every subsequent lexicographer and encyclopaedist, namely, cross-references; so that “a chain may be carried on from one end of an art to the other” (PMM). Regarding this fundamentally important work, Walsh has written: ‘Although the Cyclopaedia is now but a landmark in the history of encylopedia publishing, its impact and influence upon later generations was incalculable. It directly influenced the famous French Encyclopedie of Diderot, and the New Cylopaedia compiled by Abraham Rees and published between 1802 and 1820 … Less directly, the pioneering example of the Cyclopaedia stimulated the publication of the Encylopaedia Britannica and many subsequent works’ (Anglo-American General Encylopedias, quoted in Alston). Alston III, 535; O’Neill C-26; PMM 171

“Ephraim Chambers was born in the Lake District about 1680 and was trained as a map-maker. Inspired by the example of John Harris’s Lexicon technicum, he set out to compile a more comprehensive work. Though to Harris must go the honours of compiling the first true English encyclopedia, Chambers is clearly the father of the modern encyclopedia throughout the world. Chamber’s Cyclopaedia is particularly remarkable for its elaborate system of cross-references, and for the broadening of Harris’s coverage to include more of the humanities. The influence of Chamber’s encyclopedia has been incalculable: Diderot’s Encyclopedie would undoubtedly have taken a very different shape had it not been for Chambers’s example. Abraham Ree’s own encyclopedia was modeled on Chambers’s. The publication of the Encyclopedia Britannica was stimulated by the appearance of the Encyclopedie. and almost every subsequent move in the world of encyclopedia-making is thus directly traceable to the pioneer example of Chambers’s work” (Collison, pp. 103-04)