| Amos Urban Shirk |
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Information AboutAmos Urban Shirk |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT AMOS URBAN SHIRK | |
| encyclopædia britannica | |
| shirk, amos urban | |
| 1890s births | |
| 1956 deaths | |
| american book and manuscript collectors | |
| encyclopedists | |
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As a businessman he worked in the food industry. He wrote ''Marketing Through Food Brokers'', published in 1939 by McGraw-Hill . He invented a synthetic Chicle and introduced Vitamin capsules to grocery stores. He was also renowned as a prodigious reader. Shirk read the entire 23-volume 1911 ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' from cover to cover in four and a half years, reading on average 3 hours per night, and taking two to six months per volume. As of 1938 he had begun reading the 14th edition, saying he found it a "big improvement" over the 11th, and saying that "most of the material had been completely rewritten". Shirk did not limit himself to ''Britannica''. He also read Henry Smith Williams 's 24-volume ''Historians' History of the World'', which took him two years. Among his other feats of prodigious reading were an eighteen-volume set of Dumas (read twice), a thirty-two-volume set of Balzac (twice), and a twenty-volume set of Charles Dickens (three times). Shirk had other hobbies including Painting and Record Collecting . SEE ALSO REFERENCES
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