History
The first edition was published by Plon in the first quarter of 1963 was sold in 20,000 copies. It was a 632-page illustrations-free paperback. In addition to a brief table of contents, the book included a 10-page index. The author introduced it as a “complete, up-to-date, handy and easy-to-read” book. He announced the book would be published yearly. The next edition was published in the third quarter of 1964: the book was made of a cardboard binding and was a little bit larger (824 pages). The first editions were cosigned by Michèle Frémy, Dominique Frémy’s wife. The encyclopedia became larger over the years, reaching the size of a large dictionary. Each edition now needs the contribution of around 12,000 specialists.
The 2007 edition of Quid cost €32; its 2,176 pages contained 2,500,000 items about 650 topics. It sold only about 100,000 copies, compared to more than 400,000 in the 1990s. In February 2008, the 2008 edition was canceled by the publisher, Robert Laffont, which said that print encyclopedias can no longer compete with the free information available on the internet. Frémy, the founder of Quid, said that he would find another publisher and intended to publish a 2009 edition for Christmas 2009.
Read more about this topic: Quid (encyclopedia)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)