Encyclopédie méthodique. Arts académiques, équitation, escrime, danse, et art de nager.

Encyclopédie méthodique. Arts académiques, équitation, escrime, danse, et art de nager.
Paris - Liege. Pankuk, Plomte. 1786 445 p . Owner's hardcover, lasse, size 21.5 x 28.5 cm. A modern owner's ex-libris, a two-page impression from the resolutions of the parliament of 1698 is enclosed. The book is without significant defects, minor foxings, frayed edges.

A methodical encyclopedia known as ” Encyclopédie Panckoucke", is a monumental encyclopedia based on the Encyclopedia of the Dictionary of Science, Art and Crafts by Diderot and d'Alembert with the aim of improving and completing it. Unlike the latter, the methodological encyclopedia is divided into topics scattered across more than 40 scientific dictionaries. Thus, the goal was to eliminate the division that was considered excessive in Diderot's work, which required "reading a hundred articles to have a sufficient understanding of the subject." 

The series was started by subscription in 1782 by the bookseller Charles-Joseph Pankuk, in Lille, and then in Paris, where he managed to create the first journalistic empire of that time. From 1782 to 1789 he was assisted by the bookseller and publisher Clement Plomte from Liege.

The publication lasted half a century and ended in 1832 . After the death of Charles-Joseph Pancook in 1798, the publication was provided by his son-in-law and assistant Henri Agasse (1752-1813), and then his daughter Antoinette-Pauline Agasse.

This venture, in which several hundred authors participated, resulted in a collection of 206 volumes covering more than 125,000 pages and almost 4,500 engravings,

The co-authors were specialists of that time and great scientists who had a certain freedom of writing that went beyond the vague collections of the previous encyclopedia.

Like the encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert, the methodical encyclopedia was forged in Padua, which was then on the territory of the Republic of Venice, between 1784 and 1817 under the name: methodical encyclopedia. New edition. The full number of volumes is also not known here, and perhaps not all the materials of the Paris edition have been reproduced. There are very few "Venetian" volumes in French libraries, while Italian libraries are well stocked.

Many libraries have full versions of the edition. However, the number of volumes is rarely the same. The difficulty is due to the fact that the volumes were sent to subscribers in the form of sheets, not bound volumes. Many reasons prompted not to combine pages into volumes and leave the choice of grouping sheets to subscribers: the length of publication led to an increase in the number of printing machines, and sometimes one printing house was faster than another: Volume 3 is ready before Volume 1, for example. In addition, there have been fakes. Some publishers received the recordings and edited them themselves. For this reason, volumes of illustrations very often appeared before volumes of text. Finally, the authors were often late. You can see the differences in publication dates between Volume I and Volume III (architecture: Volume I in 1788 and Volume III in 1825). Thus, mailings to subscribers were made from the moment of publication, but without binding, which had to be done independently at the end of the published volumes.

Thus, the number of volumes may vary. It is impossible to speak confidently about a complete collection, but in libraries you can find a very large number of volumes (more than 200).

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