Amazing story of the world’s dumbest encyclopedia.

Adler decided that there are 102 great ideas�running alphabetically from Angel to World�and was able to hire a staff of unemployed intellectual workers to plow through the fifty-four volumes, constituting roughly 32,000 pages, to discover 163,000 referents in them to the 102 great ideas. The project took eight years and roughly a million dollars, back in the 1950s, when a million dollars really was a million dollars.

Link (Thanks, Margot!)