Andrew Bell (1725/6–1809) was a Scottish engraver, printer, and with his fellow printer Colin Macfarquhar co-founder of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was probably born in Edinburgh, the son of John Bell, a baker.[1]
After having received little formal education, Bell was apprenticed to the engraver Richard Cooper, and began his career fulfilling commissions for engraving such items as plates, documents and dog collars.[2]
Bell has been described as “strikingly ugly” by his biographers, very short with an immense nose and deformed legs,[1] but he was able to make fun of his deformities; he deliberately rode the tallest horse available in Edinburgh and always mounted by a ladder, to the cheers of onlookers.[3] Bell married Anne Wake, the daughter of an excise officer, on 20 June 1756, and they had two daughters.[1]
Encyclopædia Britannica
The French Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772, was the inspiration for the creation of the Encyclopædia Britannica,[3] but it is uncertain whether Bell or Macfarquahar was the first come up with the idea.[2] The first edition of Britannica appeared in instalments from 1768 to 1771, followed by a three-volume quarto set in 1771, edited by William Smellie and containing 160 plates by Bell.[1]
The Encyclopædia Britannica became a best-seller, netting Bell and Macfarquhar a sizeable fortune. On his death in Edinburgh on 10 June 1809, Bell’s estate included printing works, a linen factory, a house in a fashionable residential suburb of Edinburgh, and about £25,000, equivalent to about £2.15 million as at 2022.[1][a]Calculated using the real wealth value of £25,000 as at 1809.[4]
Kafker, Frank A. “Bell, Andrew (1725/6–1809).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Online, Oxford University Press, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1994.
Kafker, Frank A. “The Achievement of Andrew Bell and Colin Macfarguhar as the First Publishers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, Sept. 1995, pp. 139–52.
Kogan, Herman. The Great EB; The Story of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. University of Chicago Press, 1958.
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