Britannica Book of the Year 1985 [antikvár]

Letter to the Reader This volume represents an epochal undertaking. It reflects the first organic change in encyclopaedia yearbooks since those annual supplements were originally devised as a means of keeping an encyclopaedia up-to-date. For readers long familiar with the Britannica Book of the Year, a guide to the new additions presented here, and to the substantial reorganization of the contents, is essential. To new readers, a welcome and an introduction to this new work are due. In the 1985 Encyclopedia Britannica, volatile statistical information about the nations of the world has, so far as possible, been removed from the Macroptedia volumes and concentrated in a new book called Britannica World Data, which is contained within this volume. Annually revising hundreds of pages scattered across the alphabet in the Macroptedia, so as to update constantly changing economic and other short-lived statistics, has been a manifest impossibility. It was partly to relieve this problem—though it could not be fully cured—that the Book of the Year was created in 1938. Now that Britannica World Data is the locus of such information, each subscriber's set may be updated annually to an extent never before possible, by the simple expedient of adding or replacing this one volume. In recent years it has been our practice to reprint in the Book of the Year one or two newly revised Macroptedia articles. Henceforward the number of pages devoted to that updating function will be larger, as it is here. Macroptedia articles have been noted for their annotated bibliographies of important books in the fields they address. A new bibliographic element is introduced in this volume: immediately following the revised Macroptedia articles appear thoughtful reviews of several recently published books whose impact on their fields is profound; these reviews update related Macroptedia bibliographies. The order in which articles appear has been changed in this Book of the Year in response to reader suggestions, to accord more closely with the manner in which the Macropcedia is organized, and for other reasons. The most conspicuous element in this reorganization is the relocation of all the narrative articles about the nations of the world, withdrawing them from an all-embracing alphabetical order (Aerial Sports, Afghanistan, African Affairs ) and grouping them in a single "superarticle," World Affairs. It is organized by modern geopolitical regions, so that, for instance, the reader turning to the region Middle East and North Africa will find there the subarticle Middle Eastern and North African Affairs, followed by sections on all the countries of the region in alphabetical order. At the beginning of the World Affairs article is an alphabetical table of contents to the whole article, including all the countries, the several regional affairs commentaries, Dependent States, United Nations, Commonwealth of Nations, and Political Parties.