From: Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net
The 12th edition from 1922 also had 32 volumes.
I was afraid someone was going to mention that.
Yes, but the three additional volumes, which bring the Encyclopaedia up to date with articles on the World War and the latest developments in Aeronautics (with a nice diagram of an Immelmann turn), and developments in architecture such as the Woolworth Building in New York, are captioned "New Volumes" on the spine, have their own separate index, and are not integrated into the main text at all. There isn't even a page of cross-reference stickers to glue into the main volumes (actually I don't know whether Britannica had those; World Book certainly did, though).
So IMHO these are not really part of the encyclopedia proper. They are more like a three-volume Britannica Book of the Year.
I also _think_ that the Britannica 3 has considerably thicker volumes and smaller print than the Eleventh Edition had. Neil Harris says it has about 44 million words. The Eleventh edition--someone probably has an actual word count--has 29 volumes of about 1000 pages each, with about two columns of fifty lines of ten words per line = 30,000,000 words, so the Britannica has grown more than the count of volumes would suggest.
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