Total Knowledge in Teutonic Tomes? Encyclopedic Handbooks in the Chemical Sciences, ca. 1930-1960

The question of how the pre-digital modern sciences have coped with knowledge inflation is as open as timely. Handbooks, understood as heavy, multivolume reference works claiming to present a discipline’s essential knowledge in a systematic order, were an innovation to deal with this problem, which flourished particularly in Germanophone science. The tomes of such scientific encyclopediae were consulted for reference, and often became canonical. This paper contours the “Handbuchwissenschaft” (Fleck) as an ensemble of specific actors and practices by scrutinizing the making of a central reference work on inorganic chemical substances, “Gmelins Handbuch der anorganischen Chemie” (8th edition, >700 volumes). How did the hundreds of involved “paper scientists” and clerks extract and compile knowledge deemed reliable? How was the editing of this megalomaniac book organized by a state institute in the rapidly changing linguistic and technological environment of the post-war decades? While the concept of book informing Gmelin and other Germanophone handbooks was framed in a holistic discourse on knowledge, the rapid increase of journal articles subverted this concept, leading to a crisis of the project after 1960. Looking at the handbook as a past solution to knowledge inflation does not only permit to re-evaluate the role of books among the modern sciences’ media, it may also be informative for the history of our own discipline, since Gmelin and other handbook projects contributed to historiography e.g. by collecting or editing sources.