A new, more manageable edition of the Encyclopedia Hebraica has been released with the same number of references, but half the number of volumes.
The new edition is the work of Lakiva Starostinetzki, a self-professed farmer from Kibbutz Dahlia outside Haifa, who presented the Library of Congress with a complimentary set of the encyclopedia Friday. The encyclopedia is published by Sifriat Poalim, a publishing company of the Kibbutz Artzi movement.
Starostinetzki was able to shorten the set from 34 to 18 volumes by using a thinner, higher quality paper he found in a 19th-century British medical encyclopedia.
He also compiled the encyclopedia’s 2,600 references into a separate book instead of adding them to the bottom of each page.
The Encyclopedia Hebraica contains 7,500 entries written by a wide range of Israeli authors, including former Premier David Ben Gurion and Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz of Hebrew University.
The set can be purchased for about $750 in the U.S. and $900 in Israel.
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