To face Globe

Astronomical plate taken from A New Royal and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, London 1770-1771, Printed of J. Cooke 

This is a work in two large volumes, 35.5 x 23.5 cm, respectively published in London in 1770 and 1771, which collects in alphabetical order a few hundred entries illustrating both scientific and technological knowledge and the development of arts and crafts of the time. 

The single entries, written by the most authoritative European experts, were then revised and edited by M. Hinde for the field related to anatomy, medicine and chemistry, by W. Squire for mathematics, by T. Marshall for Botany and by Thomas Cooke for the humanities. One hundred and one plates produced by relative copper engravings illustrate the two volumes. The engravings, equally divided among the various fields of knowledge, reproduce both natural subjects and the most up-to-date instruments used to investigate them. A considerable part concerns instead the working tools of the various arts and crafts.

The work has come down to us in very few copies, only twenty-three copies are known, because the copper plates were initially confiscated, before printing, by the Court of Chancery of London as a result of the bankruptcy of the publisher of Bevis, Johan Neale. The twenty-three known copies are part of a print run produced later in 1786 by John Horsfall, the executor of Bevis' will, under the title of Atlas Celeste. For the moment, the story of how the twelve plates contained in A New Royal and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences were able to anticipate by about fifteen years the diffusion of the originals they imitate is still to be reconstructed. 

The encyclopedia, now quite rare and almost unexamined by critics, was influenced by the better known and older Cyclopaedia: Or An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences by Ephraim Chambers (ca. 1680-1740), published in England in 1728 (see Felice Stoppa, Atlas Coelestis, http://www.atlascoelestis.com/Universal%20dictionary%20pagina.htm).