100 years with Nobel laureates

Einstein, Marie Curie, Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russel troop out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica archives

MADHUMITA CHAKRABORTY

On a cold November day in 1895, the inventor of the dynamite, the altruistic and wealthy Alfred Bernhard Nobel, drew up a will in Paris that would astound friends and relations after his death. That legacy, deposited in a Stockholm bank, has brought a century of honour and recognition to scientists, scholars, litterateurs and philanthropists.

The centenary of the Nobel Prize, first awarded in 1901, will be celebrated most in Sweden, where the King and Queen have already opened a centennial exhibition at Stockholm’s old stock exchange. ‘Cultures of Creativity’, displaying archival footage, photographs and other memorabilia of 30 Nobel laureates like Madame Curie, Martin Luther King and Samuel Beckett, and their creative work, will ultimately move to a permanent museum in 2004.

Sweden and Great Britain pay philatelic tributes to the Nobel Prize in postmarks that commemorate specific laurels, like the Nobel Prizes for economics, physics or peace. In New Delhi, the event will be celebrated by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which co-publishes 100 Years with Nobel Laureates with New Delhi-based printers, I K International.

“This is the first book produced for the world market and world audience by Encyclopaedia Britannica (India),” says its managing director in India, Mr Aalok Wadhwa. I K International, which lends its printing presses to publishers such as Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall and Rupa & Company, will market the digest in South Asia. Encyclopaedia Britannica will distribute the book in the rest of the world.

Encyclopaedia Britannica: 100 Years With Nobel Laureates, commemorating the creativity of the greatest minds in recent history, will be released on December 6, when a week-long celebration of the Nobel Prize centenary will be on in Sweden. The unique compendium bunches George Bernard Shaw’s essay on the principles and outlook of socialism with Marie Curie’s article on radium. Albert Einstein’s theories on space-time nestle with a rare essay by Bertrand Arthur William Russel.

The potpourri of essays by physicists and physiologists, philanthropists and poets (all bound by a SEK 10 million tribute to excellence) make up only the first section of this digest. The rest of the voluminous encyclopaedia consists of biographies of all Nobel laureates and Alfred Nobel, tables of subject categories, and an introduction to the Nobel Foundation.

The thread of brilliance, spawned across a century, binds together intellectual outpourings of Milton Friedman and Alexander Fleming with C V Raman and Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar, who discusses Einstein’s general theory of relativity and cosmology. “A lot of the Nobel laureates wrote for us before they got the Nobel Prize,” muses Mr Wadhwa.

The tenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1902, for instance, featured a discussion on electric waves by English physicist Joseph Thomson, who made waves with his discovery of the electron in 1897. Mr Thomson was awarded the Nobel in 1906 for his research on the electrical conductivity of gases.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s 233-year-old “tradition” of compiling “authentic information” enabled its “resource centre” in Chicago to accumulate a hundred articles written by Nobel laureates over the last century. “The writing for Encyclopaedia Britannica has always been by the greatest minds,” points out Mr Wadhwa.

Even though the “hard work was really done over the last 100 years,” a great deal of effort in editing and art-work, helped fructify this digest of some of the most sought-after essays of the times. Co-publisher I K International plans a plump print run of 4,000 copies. The company’s director, Mr Krishan Makhijani points out that his marketing rights of the encyclopaedia (priced towards the upper reaches of the book shelf) extended beyond India, to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

Mr Wadhwa at Encyclopaedia Britannica does not believe that price could deter encyclopaedia enthusiasts. He points out that all the 6,000 copies in the first print run of Students Britannica India were sold out. “We were surprised at the rate at which it disappeared,” says he. Students Britannica India and the Britannica Quiz Master were the first Britannica publications in India.

Mr Makhijani echoes the optimism about the compendium of articles by Nobel laureates, but prefers caution as his marketing mantra. “We will print more copies as and when we get orders,” says he. Who needs a market marker on a 100 Years With Nobel Laureates, anyway? Priceless moments, surely!

Encyclopaedia Britannica—100 Years With Nobel Laureates; Encyclopaedia Britannica & I K International; Rs 1,495; Pp 1,100