It also eschewed the bulky format that and "found it necessary to disregard all common idea as to what constitutes dignity in the externals of books". The undertaking was a success, selling seventy thousand issues in its first year.[2] The original edition consisted of 48 numbered "treatises", plus an unnumbered introductory treatise "An Account of the Earth, Physical and Political."[3] Improved two volume editions were published in 1842 and 1848.[4][5] A third improved edition appeared in 1857.[6], shortly before the Chambers Brothers publication of the first edition of their major encyclopedia in 1860.