Reprint of Otto's Encyclopaedia complete
In a café, just two numbers away from the Dum Panu z Kunstatu in Prague's Old Town, two publishing houses, Argo and Paseka, announced this week that their joint effort, that had lasted for seven years, has successfully come to a head. The two publishers decided to reprint one as yet unsurpassed work of Czech lexicography, the forty-tome Ottuv slovnik naucny or Otto's Encyclopaedia which was first published between 1888 and 1908. At the end of the 19th century, publisher Jan Otto drew together a team of leading Czech academics who compiled a monumental encyclopaedia which till this day remains the one source of information Czechs turn to if they need to find for example everything about watermills. Milan Gelnar is the director of the publishing house Argo, one of the two publishers of the reprinted Otto's Encyclopaedia.
In a café, just two numbers away from the Dum Panu z Kunstatu in Prague's Old Town, two publishing houses, Argo and Paseka, announced this week that their joint effort, that had lasted for seven years, has successfully come to a head. The two publishers decided to reprint one as yet unsurpassed work of Czech lexicography, the forty-tome Ottuv slovnik naucny or Otto's Encyclopaedia which was first published between 1888 and 1908. At the end of the 19th century, publisher Jan Otto drew together a team of leading Czech academics who compiled a monumental encyclopaedia which till this day remains the one source of information Czechs turn to if they need to find for example everything about watermills. Milan Gelnar is the director of the publishing house Argo, one of the two publishers of the reprinted Otto's Encyclopaedia.
"It began sometime in 1993 or 1994. Many of my friends and colleagues suggested to me that I should publish a new edition of Otto's Encyclopaedia. They came to me and said could you please publish the dictionary, I need it for my work. At the beginning it seemed like a foolish adventure. It is a great commitment; because once you start publishing the 40-volume encyclopaedia, and you find that it doesn't work, you have to go on publishing the other volumes even if you were to ruin your publishing house, unless you want to lose face. That's why I approached Ladislav Horacek from the Paseka publishing house, because I knew he was just as crazy as I am, and he would go for it with me."
The forty-volume encyclopaedia was published as a photo reprint, which means it was copied from the original edition which is a hundred years old. Usually such old books have either pages missing, stained or torn, so it was not easy to find an immaculate specimen. Milan Gelnar of Argo describes the process.
"We bought three sets of the encyclopaedia. Out of the three specimens of each volume we chose the best looking and started to scan page by page, or more precisely the printing works did. We had to choose each time which one to use."
It is generally recognised that the Otto dictionary has not been matched since in this country. But being more than 100 years old, naturally, many of the headings are dated and all of 20th century history and science is missing. Publisher Milan Gelnar says that his original idea to publish a modernised encyclopaedia proved to be too demanding a task.
"When the venture started to look promising, in the first wave of euphoria we thought we could publish a new Otto's Encyclopaedia, complete with updated headings, in a similar explanatory or essayistic style but we soon found out we did not have enough strength even to find editors, let alone a team of scientists and contributors who would be capable of producing something like that. At the moment, two newer encyclopaedias are available on the market but they have only concise entries. You only find basic facts in them but it's not a good read. But Otto's dictionary can be read almost like a work of fiction."
The reprint of the Otto Encyclopaedia published by Argo and Paseka has over 240,000 entries, more than 38,000 pages and almost 10,000 illustrations. The complete edition costs 25,000 crowns.
