I have several one-volume encyclopedias, from between 1870 and 1910. Fascinating! I love paging through (they are all lushly illustrated) and reading about what the states and countries were then; how to clean a nubia; how to make gooseberry jam; all about the new automobiles and aeroplanes; all the recent popular books and plays; who died that year.
Constantly updated websites will never have that kind of historical charm.
That reminds me of my childhood - we never had a full set of encyclopedias. But as an elementary schooler I can remember having two or three different “A” volumes of the encyclopedia because they sold the “A” volume at the supermarket for like $1 and then the rest of the set was far more expensive.
You’re right, Wiki didn’t win as EB still exists. But to pretend that the EB doesn’t deal with pop culture is just plain ignorant:
Also, Wiki is incredibly accurate.
But speaking of errors, the EB entry on Batman lists incorrect dates for Batman: The Animated Series. The show didn’t stop running in 1995, it just received a name change. The final episode actually aired in 1999.
Hey, don’t tell me, tell Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopedia Britannica Inc.!
Someone came out with a condensed version
My mother loves to tell people that I read the EB as a kid. I didn’t think there was anything odd about doing that at the time. I have to be careful about clicking extra links when going to Wikipedia. Can waste a lot of time that way. Is just browsing Wikipedia considered odd?
Have an EB and an old children’s encyclopedia* in the basement. Don’t know what to do with them. I don’t think thrift stores like them anymore.
Just to check on things: MS killed the disc version of Encarta a long time ago and the online version in 2009. Now there was a waste of money. (Remember when Slate used to link to Encarta all the time?) MS bought the online rights to Colliers to use for Encarta. So they killed that too.
(*Don’t remember the brand. It’s the “one with red covers”.)
Sorry. The sentence in the article was written awkwardly. It should have been written: “Of 12,000 sets printed, 8,000 sets have already been sold; 4,000 sets remain to be sold.” Is it relevant that the sets have been stored in a warehouse?
I was being sarcastic. Note the smilie.
We had a set of Childrens Britannica, published in the UK, when I was a kid (late 60’s). Much of my knowledge of the world comes from there. We still have it, and it’s still worth browsing through.
We had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and Britannica Junior when I was growing up. The latter lived on a bookshelf on the stairway landing and looked like this, and at times I was known to dip into a volume for a little light reading, though I never read anywhere near the whole thing.
ETA: Is that the one you were remembering, ftg?
Thanks for that. Both the article, and the comment section, were very interesting to read.
Was it the “Funk and Wagnalls” encyclopedia? I had a set of the supermarket Funk and Wagnalls as a kid too. While I did read though them quite a lot, or referenced them for homework, I also used them as building blocks for whatever toys I was playing with at the time. You can build a pretty impressive fortress using Funk and Wagnalls.
There’s a company that spams Amazon with “print on demand” versions of Wikipedia articles. They attempt to make money off of people who are not aware that these “books” are just copy-and-paste versions of wiki articles. I wish Amazon would do something about this.
I must have been the king of encyclopedias as a kid. We couldn’t afford much as kids so stuff others would have thrown away I kept. I had
–full set of Funk and Wagnalls from 1954 with about 20 years’ worth of yearbooks.
–full set of American People’s Encyclopedia from the same time plus a dozen years of yearbooks
–full set of some encyclopedia from 1945 that started with “C” but wasn’t Colliers’
–assorted volumes of EB, Junior Britannica, World Book, and Colliers’
We had the Funk & Wagnalls set as well, probably from the early '60s. A&P sold it to us.
In the early seventies, Mom splurged on the Britannica.
Wish I’d kept something from either one of them.
“Look that up in your Funk & Wagnall’s!”
My grandparents had a Britanica set, but I never really liked it. They seemed to have too much information for me, and they were so dense. I liked World Book better. Less is sometimes more.
EDIT: I mean literally dense. Too many words on the same page, with little space between lines. And the only pictures were line drawings that barely even looked like what they were talking about. The World Books just looked better.
