The picture encyclopedia in question was a popular work invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in 18th century Germany. This study of an individual object provides an unusual perspective on the German bourgeois enlightenment

This is a book about a box that contained the world. The box was the "Picture Academy for the Young, a popular encyclopedia in pictures invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in eighteenth-century Germany. Children were expected to cut out the pictures from the "Academy, paste them onto cards, and arrange those cards in ordered compartments-the whole world filed in a box of images.
As Anke te Heesen demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with creating and maintaining an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order. The box, and its images from nature, myth, and biblical history, were intended to teach children how to collect, store, and order knowledge. te Heesen compares the "Academy with other aspects of Enlightenment culture, such as commercial warehouses and natural history cabinets, to show how the kinds of collecting and ordering practices taught by the "Academy shaped both Enlightenment thought and the developing middle class in Germany. "The World in a Box, illustrated with a multitude of images of and from Stoy's "Academy, offers a glimpse into a time when it was believed that knowledge could be contained and controlled.