 In November 1750, Diderot released a “Prospectus” for the Encyclopédie, inviting readers to subscribe to a new multivolume compendium. In this preview, Diderot began to reveal his conception of what the Encyclopédie would become. No longer a translation of someone else’s book, and even less a staid compendium of already established learning, Diderot imagined the Encyclopédie as a dynamic site of living thought, an engine for changing, not codifying, existing knowledge. These ideas were further developed in Diderot’s article “Encyclopédie”, which was published in volume V of the work in 1755.