Book

The Encyclopédie is the title of the collection of articles and illustrations, consisting of 28 volumes organized by category. The project’s goal was to compile all knowledge from an independent reasoning perspective into a printed collection of volumes. The Encyclopédie was a massive project, and therefore had many contributors. The most prominent authors were Denis Diderot (the chief editor), Jean le Rond d’Alembert (co-editor), several philosophes of the French Enlightenment, and notably Louis de Jaucourt, who wrote a staggering quarter of the Encyclopédie’s articles. There are many more contributors, all covering the vast list of topics, but Diderot was the most involved, from its creation to completion.

The project began in 1745, and the complete collection of 28 volumes were published in France in 1772. Within each volume, articles are organized alphabetically by category, but overall is divided into three distinct branches of knowledge, which were memory, reason, and imagination. The images in the exhibit’s items are scanned pages from the Encyclopédie’s books. The text from the published books were printed with a simple font, except for the detailed illustrations, which were hand-drawn. The books were made with paper and were bound with leather.