British Press Now Has All the News About Itself : History: New encyclopedia includes 2,800 biographies of journalists spanning last 500 years.

A killer, a murder victim, at least two blackmailers, a swindler and a military hero: All have prominent places in a new survey of Britain’s press through 500 years.

“I hope we have got everyone of note, famous and disreputable, from Caxton to Maxwell,” said the editor, Dennis M. Griffiths.

His 630,000-word tome, to be published this year by Macmillan, is called “The Encyclopedia of the British Press.” It includes 2,800 biographies of people involved with the daily and Sunday papers of Fleet Street and beyond, reaching back to the 15th Century.

William Caxton, born in 1422, was the first English printer. Caxton’s press was in Westminster and his apprentice, Wynkyn de Worde, set up another in Fleet Street, which became the center of the newspaper industry until the 1980s.

Accountants and lawyers are still sorting through the tangled affairs of Robert Maxwell, owner of the Mirror Group newspapers, who died at sea in November.

Besides ferreting in libraries, Griffiths questioned people in the industry and asked the managing editor of every national paper for a list of journalists worthy of mention.

Griffiths, a 58-year-old Welshman, has been in newspapers since he was 16. In 1985, he organized the first satellite production of a British newspaper abroad, the Sunday Express in Singapore.

Life stories in his volume include those of British-born Americans and Canadians.

“The prime example is the Scot, James Gordon Bennett, who issued the first number of the New York Herald in 1835,” Griffiths said. “It was his son, also named James Gordon, who sent Stanley to find Livingstone in 1870.”

Every letter of the alphabet is represented in the biographies. Under X is Ximenes, the pseudonym of crossword compiler D. S. MacNutt, whose Byzantine puzzles intrigued and infuriated readers of the Sunday Observer.

Daniel Defoe, author of “Robinson Crusoe” and “Moll Flanders,” is included as the founder of The Review.

Defoe, regarded as the father of English journalism, launched the paper in 1704 and published it three times a week until 1713. It offered news, gossip and opinion on political affairs--the forerunner of newspaper editorials.

“The biographies of the dead tend to be more interesting than those of the living,” Griffiths said in an interview. “There seems to be more uniformity these days.”

Some unusual cases are in his collection.

Nicholas Byrne, editor of The Morning Post, was stabbed at his desk in his office in The Strand and died of the wound weeks later, in May, 1833. He had received threats to his life, but the reason was never discovered and his murder remains unsolved.

Harold Bower, 1815-1884, Paris correspondent of the Morning Post, stabbed his friend Saville Morton to death when informed by Mrs. Bower that Morton was the father of her fifth child. He was acquitted by a French jury and was hired to replace Morton as correspondent of the Morning Advertiser.

Barnard Gregory, 1796-1852, a blackmailing editor and actor, launched The Satirist, or The Censor of The Times. A duke he victimized started a riot at Covent Garden when Gregory was playing Hamlet there. Gregory was imprisoned twice for libel and his paper was suppressed after 924 issues.

Charles Westmacott, 1787-1868, also a blackmailer, sent his victims demands for money along with a copy of what he intended to print. He was thrashed at Covent Garden in 1830 by the actor Charles Kemble, whose actress daughter Fanny was one of Westmacott’s victims.

Henry Benson, 1848-1888, was active during his 40 years: He bilked Scottish bettors through a racing newspaper that published only one issue; worked frauds in Belgium, France and Switzerland; served 10 years in prison for banking fraud in London; dealt in bogus U.S. mining shares, and posed in Mexico City as soprano Adelina Patti’s agent to sell $25,000 worth of tickets to a concert that never took place. Benson was arrested for defrauding Americans and taken to New York, where he killed himself in the Tombs prison.

Viscount Fincastle--Alexander Edward Murray, 1871-1962--was a special correspondent for The Times of London while serving in the army. He was awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest medal for bravery, for trying to save a wounded journalist during a battle on the India-Afghan frontier in 1897.

The encyclopedia lists the 15 women who have edited national or daily newspapers, starting with Mary de la Riviere, who succeeded Jonathan Swift at The Examiner in 1711.

Also on the list is an American, Chazy Dowaliby, who edited the Coventry Evening Telegraph in 1990. Griffiths said she has returned to the United States.