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I don’t know about you, but I have fond memories of encyclopedia sets from a very early age. Mom and Dad had a set of World Book encyclopedias – long gone, I’m afraid. My grandmother, who I spent quite a lot of time with as a child, had a Children’s Book set that may have dated to when my mother, or at least my aunts and uncles, were young. I read them. Just.. picked them up and started reading through. The First Reader and I started comparing notes as I was photographing the book for today’s art book post. 
I don’t know exactly where or when I picked this book up. It’s a solo book. Yes, it is volume VI, and no, I have no intentions of trying to find the rest of the set!
One of the big regrets I have concerning library management in my life is letting go of the Encylopedia Brittanica set my Dad brought home to me about a decade ago. It was the 1885 edition. Sure, it was missing a volume. But what a piece of history!
And now for an experiment…
The First Reader and I were sitting on the porch chatting about reading the encyclopedia. We both did, as young readers. He read at school, I read when it was too wet and rainy to get outdoors (and Grandma living in the PNW meant that happened often!). We both discovered that we have fond memories of these treasure-troves of information. Back in the day, when they were sold by subscription, and you got a book a month. Or you took out a loan (imagine! Going into debt for books! We live in a weird and wonderful age, but there was a time when information and education was worth so much more… the equivalent of the college degree, I suppose now) to get your set. That was the golden age of books as physical objects. Many of those sets were on display in the public area of the house, and most were never read. Unless you were odd little people, like us.
So we got to talking on the porch, as we often do. And I got a wild hair, and pulled out my recorder. So here you have the first video of what I am going to continue as a series of interviews… join us on the porch for a chat about books.
Comments
8 responses to “Bibliophilia: Encyclopedias”
that book sounds like a sci-fi book.
It does, doesn’t it? I think the reason I kept it or picked it up (literally cannot remember where it came from) was that over-the-top breathless enthusiasm in the title.
Common scene in our family while growing up.
I (and/or my younger sister Ruth) would ask a question and Dad would say “Let’s see what the encyclopedia says”. 😀
Mom & Dad had purchased it some time after they married (can’t remember if they got it before I came along).
Don’t remember what happened to it.
I wonder where they all went? My family had at least three or four sets over the years (not at the same time) and they all went away.
My mother, and my grandmother, both wanted to give us a set of old encyclopedias. We just don’t have the room.
Much of my life I didn’t have the room. Or had to move and could only take a very limited amount of stuff along. This is life.
Danny Dunn and the ummmm, I can’t remember but I think I remember when he shrunk himself to the size of a drop of water.
I have fond memories of an encyclopedia set called the Book of Knowledge, which had its own idiosyncratic organization so that I could look up instructions for building a canoe out of birchbark (not terribly useful since we lived in a pine forest), turn a few pages, and find myself chanting something from the Lays of Ancient Rome. Any volume of that set was good for hours of exploration on a rainy day.
For serious study we had Britannica, but my use of that was monitored after I left the volume with Joan of Arc open after doing a school report and the family cat ate Joan’s first page.