Excellent ... Garfield, an Englishman in his early 60s, is lucid, witty, learned and clearly a bibliomaniac ... In All the Knowledge in the World, he has produced a lively threnody to the encyclopedic impulse, or the powerful desire to grasp and encapsulate everything that is known within a single book or set of books ... A lively threnody may seem an oxymoron, but Mr. Garfield both loves encyclopedias and bewails their demise.
Witty and geekily eclectic ... Garfield, the author of numerous books on diverse subjects such as timekeeping, dogs and typefaces, regards the wikipedists with an admiring scepticism.