Everybody's Enquire Within

Contents

The editor Charles Ray informs in his Introduction that the book contains 10,000 questions and offers 100,000 facts in answer to these questions. He gives the following examples of the questions posed:

“Are diamonds always white? What is a magic square? Must the Riot Act be read before soldiers can fire? Did the ‘Titanic’ sink to the bottom of the sea? Can an egg be balanced on end? What is rice paper? Is the number 13 unlucky? What is the Jolly Roger? Is a high forehead a sign of intelligence? Is a scare a cure for hiccoughs? What is a Nordic? Does ivy damage a wall? What is a singing mouse? Does it rain on the Sahara? Was St. George a Briton?”“An outstanding feature of the work is the vast mass of illustrations specially prepared with the greatest care by a staff of experts – photographs gathered from all over the world, and drawings by artists of technical knowledge and high ability. The full-page drawings are particularly valuable and their comprehensiveness is unique. Whether it be a page of British freshwater fishes, of British owls or hawks or ducks, of railway signals or ships’ sails or buoys, or road signs or bridges, every recognised variety is given, so that in several hundreds of these pages there are many thousands of individual illustrations.”

At a conservative estimate, there are at least 5000 black-and-white photographs, diagrams, drawings and illustrations in the book. Very few of the pages have only one of these (e.g. p. 424), and they mostly have at least two or more of these. Also the estimate does not include the countless illustrations and drawings contained in the following:

(1) The book has innumerable whole pages containing nothing but black-and-white illustrations e.g.(2) Female interest is not neglected for example:(3) There are also fifty-four colour plate pages, one of which consists of three folded pages - “Flags of All Independent Nations” – frontispiece. Ten of the colour plates have two folded pages, and forty-three are single pages. The following are the ten double page colour plates:

Republications

A small part of this book, roughly one-fifth (311 pages), was published in 2012 under the title of Everybody's Book of Knowledge (having been originally published in 2007 under the title of Every Boy's Book of Knowledge). It also contains sixteen of the colour plates of which eight are double folded pages. The two double folded pages that are not included in this volume are "What is That Medal Ribbon?" and "What is That Berry? Wild Berries of the British Countryside."