The Encyclopedie Methodique

Even before he had brought to completion the great thirty-five-volume Encyclopédie —by the publication in 1776-77 of its Supplément in five volumes, and in 1780 of Pastor Mouchon's Table analytique et raisonnée in two volumes—a now relatively forgotten Parisian bookseller, publisher, author, and translator, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, had already begun preparations to put out a new Encyclopédie, to be called the Encyclopédie méthodique, ou par ordre de matières. Unlike Diderot's original, this Encyclopédie was to be composed of a collection of individual “dictionaries,” each one dealing with a different subject. Although the entrepreneur was aware from the start of the magnitude of the task, he could not foresee the many difficulties and delays which were to beset the undertaking before it was to be finally completed by his daughter, fifty years later, as “la collection la plus vaste qu'ait jamais produite la librairie française.”