Kristen Watson, age 10, of Scottsdale, Ariz., for her question:
WHO WROTE THE FIRST ENCYCLOPEDIA?
A good encyclopedia is the result of a great deal of work by a team of scholars and specialists, librarians and researchers, educators and editors. Also on the team must be mapmakers and artists. Then there must be a large investment of money by a publisher to maintain a permanent staff to keep abreast of breakthroughs in all fields of knowledge.
An encyclopedia is one or more books with facts about people, places and things. It may deal with all areas of knowledge, or it may specialize in just one field.
In ancient times, it was difficult for scholars to find needed information. Often the facts were scattered in scrolls and manuscripts in various parts of the world. Ancestors to today's encyclopedias were special reports the scholars wrote after gathering information in a number of different places.
Greek philosopher Aristotle is called the father of the encyclopedia by many scholars. In the 300s B.C., he made one of the first attempts to bring all existing knowledge together in a series of books. He also presented his own ideas on many subjects.
A Roman writer named Marcus Terentius Varro made the next attempt in about 50 B.C. He wrote a nine volume work on science and art called ''Disciplines.''
Another Roman writer, this one named Pliny the Elder, wrote a set of reference books called "Natural History'' about 50 A.D. It contained thousands of facts about minerals, plants and animals.
A first Chinese encyclopedia was compiled about 200 A.D., but there is no trace of it today. A second one, published in the late 200s A.D., was revised in the early 1600s.
Isidore, the Bishop of Seville, compiled a 20¬volume collection of encyclopedic facts in 623 B.C. that was used for about 1,000 years. Its information, however, wasn't completely accurate.
A first Arabic reference book was compiled in Baghdad by a scholar named Ibn Qutaiba in the 800s. And then in about 990 A.D. a Persian scholar named al Khwarizmi compiled a book called "Key to the Sciences.'' It included such fields as poetry and grammar as well as foreign knowledge of logic and alchemy.
From 1200 until the 1600s, some original reference works appeared but most were copies, made slowly by hand. During the late 1400s movable type for printing was developed, and in 1481 English printer William Caxton published "The Mirror of the World,'' one of the first reference works in English.
Andy's favorite reference library is the encyclopedia called World Book, which was first published in eight volumes in 1917. Today it is the world's best selling encyclopedia.