by Eric Felten Print this article Encyclopaedia Britannica, Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary, and Cram’s Popular Atlas of the World were having trouble keeping up. It was the war, you see. Cram’s atlas (was there ever a less mellifluous brand name?) is new to my shelves, a manifestation of my mania for books that attempt to organize all that was known about the world at a given moment. But in 1941, the facts to be known about the world were alarmingly fluid. Cram’s knew well they would be out of date before the printing plates were even inked. The