Encyclopedias, a casualty of the digital age. Time to fess up. How many of you spent a fair amount of time reading encyclopedias when you were a kid? My favorite was the Encyclopedia Brittanica which I dove into at the local library, but any encyclopedia would do.
Encyclopedias
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
My parents invested in a complete set of Britannica around 1960 and they also bought the Brittanica Book of the Year annually from 1961 through about 1982 or 83. The Books of the Year were actually my favorite reads – chock full of info about major events, prominent personalities, etc.
Guilty as charged!!
Guilty.
BUT they didn’t have everything!
That was a goto for learning about the first subject of history that interested me – WW2. Dad bought me one of those coffee table WW2 history books when I was eight. But I wanted to learn more, so I read in the encyclopedias they bought to discover more. I even read an article about Hitler to my 3rd grade class because I wanted to. That was from the middle school edition my parents bought to go with the main set. It’s worth noting that I saw a comparison to the last editions of EB some years ago and the articles were far shorter with far fewer words when compared to the editions from the 60s and 70s. Those had few illustrations and were text heavy compared to the later editions.
World Book for us kids. My dad bought them for us kids and was pretty proud of himself (English was his second language and he wasn’t much of a book person- although he would read the newspaper from front to back). Our World Book set were the go-to for all school research assignments. I direct my own children to Britannia online these days. Type the topic and voila!
Imagine kids today having to alphabetically flick through a physical encyclopaedia to find a topic- yikes! They would have a meltdown.
We had Funk & Wagnalls. I would always get distracted by other articles on the way to whatever I was looking up. Some things never change.
Parents bought us the World Book when I was about eight, and the yearbooks for about ten more years after that. I liked the yearbooks a lot, just as Elaine described. My grandparents also had about a 1935 edition of Britannica, as well as something very old called “The Book of Knowledge”, which was another multi-volume set. I spent many happy hours browsing all three sets. No one to tell me what I could or couldn’t read. What a concept.
I personally wish Google and Bing and Yahoo and all the rest would crawl back under the rocks from whence they came. Kids don’t learn much about organized thinking using search engines, IMO.
I have a couple of digital copies of Encarta (essentially Funk and Wagnalls with videos and other multimedia goodies.) What I’ve noticed recently is how I can often find basic information more quickly in Encarta 95 or 2000 than I can anywhere online, and best of all it isn’t constantly being reedited to suit modern sensibilities.
Had the World Book at school and the Book of Knowledge at home. I managed to scare up a full set of 1911 Britannicas from a rural Michigan indoor flea market for $20, and the Encyclopedia Americana from 1995 for chump change at a closing library.
Easy to get lost in those things, which is to their great merit. Also enjoyed the Great Soviet Encyclopedia at my alma mater–a look at Bizarro World, but very educational in all sorts of ways.
I forget who published the set we had, but I was a big fan.
I’m also a moderate fan of Wikipedia. I understand its weaknesses, but it really is a phenomenal collection.
Used to read ’em like novels. “S” was my favorite because it had the topic of “Space.”
My parents bought us the Encyclopedia Brittanica and the accompanying Brittanica Atlas about 1965. It was used almost daily by my brother and me. The Atlas and a globe really caught my interest. The reasons we belong to AAA is for the towing and the maps. I keep an updated map box in my car. My adult children scoff, “but you have GPS and Waze on your phone why do you need maps?” It’s because GPS is not always available in the hinterlands. Also the boys travel all over the world and it’s fun to see where they are in a foreign country. I just love maps.
We had the World Book growing up, and the accompanying year books. I’m the youngest so we had year books from years before I was born. I loved reading those, much more than the Hardy Boys books one shelf over.
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My folks made sure we kids had reference materials at home. Saved on trips to the library. I loved reading through the Compton’s Encyclopedias and Yearbooks (esp. S for Space and A for Astronomy!), and the World Book Dictionaries too!
I’m pretty sure our parents got the encyclopedias so that they could just yell “LOOK IT UP!” whenever we asked a question. 🙂
I got a set of encyclopedias from 1931 at a garage sale for $1.30 … so fun to read what people thought back then. Apparently, Hitler was a good guy who was doing a bang-up job with the German economy, and scientists speculate that there isn’t life on the moon.
We had the Encyclopedia Americana (my Dad was pursuing a grad degree in Latin American Studies, and found it more relevant). Always good for a browse as a kid!
Only had access to encyclopedias in the library where I did love to browse. At home I read the dictionary – “it’s got all the othe books in it.”
RH- Microsoft Encarta! That’s a real throwback to the 90’s. I recall the opening (I can’t remember which version) played part of MLK “I had a dream..” every time you opened it. I’d recite it like lines in a movie. Now that’s a stroll down memory (research) lane.😀
That’s all the way back from Encarta ’94, the first one. The earliest one I have, ’95, starts with a quote from Nelson Mandela, followed by Neil Armstrong’s first words on the moon, followed by a line from Death of a Salesman, all mixed with various styles of music.
RH- Thanks for the clarification. I recall my mum taking my eldest brother to queue outside a tech store to get the newly released Microsoft Office, and Encarta was sold with it as a package.