alleged plagiarized American version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1917, but see Alan White article in Variaciones Borges 15 (2003).
Fishburn and Hughes: "Many pirated and mutilated editions of the ninth and tenth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were printed in America, but none has been found with the title 'Anglo-American Cyclopaedia' or published in New York in 1917, as stated by the narrator of 'Tlön...'. The 1902 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which the 'Anglo-American Cyclopaedia' is said to be a facsimile, consists of 35 volumes. The story's alleged vol. 46 is obviously fictitious; yet this apparently fantastic occurrence seems to reflect, in part at least, the hazardous history of real encyclopaedias. In a text dated 16 October 1936 on L’Encyclopédie Française (Textos Cautivos), Borges mentions that ‘las hojas de esta Encyclopédie (como las de cierta Cyclopedia de Nueva York) se pueden desprender y reemplazar periódicamente, por otras nuevas, que los suscriptores recibirán’ (the pages of this Enciclopedia, like that of a certain Cyclopedia of New York, may, periodically, be romoved and be replaced by an updated version which will be sent to subscribers). The core of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, alleged to have been written in 1940, may be a gloss on this policy. In private conversation with the present writers, Borges maintained that he owned a copy of the untraceable 'cyclopaedia’: this may be an oblique reference to the Eleventh Edition, which he certainly owned." (12)