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Valentine’s Day is approaching, and this year I may send a mental Valentine to Horace Everett Hooper, the driving force behind the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Hooper’s forgotten today, but he was the American marketing pioneer who made the Encyclopedia Britannica famous and profitable.

Born in Massachusetts in 1859, Hooper dropped out of school and headed to Denver, where he set up a successful mail-order book business. Eventually he went to England and convinced the London Times to publish a new edition of the Britannica that could be sold through the mail on an installment plan.

After buying the publication rights around 1900, Hooper gave the Britannica a reduced British orientation and more American. He then watched its sales skyrocket before selling the Britannica’s copyright to the U.S. firm Sears Roebuck in 1920.

I admire Hooper’s salesmanship but celebrate his great encyclopedia. After Hooper bought the Britannica’s rights around 1900, he boosted sales by rounding up the best-known scholars of the era to contribute articles for his 1911 Britannica, which was the 11th edition and a benchmark in encyclopedias.

As Kenneth Clark wrote about Hooper’s 11th edition, “One leaps from one subject to another, fascinated as much by the play of mind and the idiosyncrasies of their authors as by the facts and dates … When T.S. Eliot wrote ‘Soul curled up on the window seat reading the Encyclopedia Britannica,’ he was certainly thinking of the eleventh edition.”

The 1911 reflects Western life and opinion a century ago, much of which has been radically transformed. When I need longer, more analytical articles than Google or a modern encyclopedia provides, and if the information is still likely to be viable, I turn to my personal 1911 Britannica expecting an amusing read, as I did after reading about troubadours in “The Mays of Ventadorn,” by W.S. Merwin.

A highly respected poet, Merwin relocated from the American Midwest to southern France shortly after World War II, learned about the history and legends of the area, and became fascinated with the troubadours who thrived there from 1100 to 1300 A.D.

I’d always lumped troubadours with minstrels and bards, but the 1911 Britannica put me right, saying the troubadour is “the name given to the poets of southern France and of Northern Spain and Italy who wrote in the langue d’oc from the 12th to the 14th centuries.” Their poems were usually set to music composed and often performed by the troubadour’s personal musician.

“Langue d’oc,” or “Occitan,” is the dialect spoken only in that region, and the northern French dialect, the more Germanic-influenced langue d’oil, was used in Paris and at the French royal courts and became dominant. Both “oc” and “oil,” which is pronounced “oui,” mean “yes.”

The first known troubadour was Guilhem IX, Duke of Aquitaine. Combine Casanova, Elvis and General Patton and you get someone like Guilhem. He was a very large knight and crusader, author of some wonderful poetry, and a notably lusty fellow. Crusading in the Levant exposed him to Arabic music and manners that are reflected in his songs and in the chivalric notions that flowered in his palace.

According to Wikipedia, Guilhem’s beautiful first wife was the daughter of Count Fulk the Contrary. She nagged, suffered severe mood-swings, and failed to conceive, so he divorced her.

His next wife, Philippa, produced two sons and five daughters, but Guilhem fell hard for the well-named Viscountess Dangerosa, the wife of one of his vassals. Bad things ensued, but it engendered some popular songs.

Troubadours’ songs were often compiled in handmade books that included their biography, or “vida,” which means “life” in Occitan. A famous collection of these vidas was assembled around 1300 by a librarian at a Mediterranean island monastery and translated the following century by Nostradamus. The celibate librarian’s name is lost, but he’s known as “the Monk of the Golden Isles.”

In a summary worthy of St. Valentine, he described Guilhem, perhaps wistfully, as “one of the most courtly men in the world and one of the greatest deceivers of women. He was a fine knight at arms, liberal in his womanizing, and a fine composer and singer of songs. He traveled much throughout the world, seducing women.”