Low's Encyclopedia

Low's Encyclopædia is an early American encyclopedia, titled The New and Complete American Encyclopædia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. It was published in New York City between 1805 and 1811. Consisting of seven volumes quarto, it is noteworthy among America's earliest encyclopedias for having been written in the United States, as opposed to being an American reprint of a British work, as were, for examples, Dobson's Encyclopedia (1789 to 1798), the Bradford printing (1806 to 1820) of Rees's Cyclopædia (1802 to 1820), Samuel A. Mitchell's American printing (1816) of the British Encyclopaedia (1809), or the Birch and Small printing (A. F. M. Willich and James Mease, Philadelphia, 1803) of the Domestic Encyclopedia (A. F. M. Willich, London, 1802).

The first five volumes of the encyclopedia were published by John Low (1763-1809), and the final two by his widow and successor, Esther Prentiss Low (1762-1816). John Low was born in London and immigrated to America with Esther shortly after the birth of their son John (ca. 1790–1829). By 1795, John Low had established himself as a printer and bookseller in New York City. Upon his death, Esther ran their printing establishment, and the younger John Low carried on in the printing business. She continued issuing the encyclopedia and printing maps posthumously until at least 1831.

Low's Encyclopedia is primarily an American work. Although the title page says it was taken from the Encyclopædia Perthensis, this does not appear to be the case, as this work is seven volumes of around 650 pages each, while the latter work was 23 volumes of 800 pages each. Many of the minor definitional entries are borrowed from Perthensis or Britannica, usually with changes in wording, but a roughly equal number are original, and the articles are disproportionately of American concern: London takes up half a page while New York City gets five, when populations at the time were nearly 1 million for the former city and 80,000 for the latter. By comparison, Encyclopædia Britannica's fourth edition of 1810 gives the two cities 42 pages versus one and one half, respectively. Scotland receives four pages, while each of the states of the United States get equally long articles, and most maps are of the various states. The American Revolutionary War gets a 30-page treatment, while the British revolution of 1688 gets a paragraph. The article "New York" describes Sir William Johnson as being a land jobber and an enemy of the nation, for example.

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