When I was young, my mom volunteered at a shelter and got a lot of oddball books for me to read. One was a set of Funk and Wagnalls from the fifies, and another was the American Peoples Encylopedia from the same time. (Mind you this was back in the 80s). Even though the sets were horribly outdated, I still enjoyed reading them. Anyone else have a full set of encyclopedias, then or now? How did you get them? Did you get them from the infamous “encyclopedia salesman”? And did you enjoy them?
I just turned 43. In the mid 1980’s my dad bought us a set of World Book Encyclopedias. I really enjoyed reading them.
We had a used version of the Encyclopedia Americana when I was growing up.
We also bought the Funk and Wagnalls, though we later gave it away.
We had a 1958 set of Americana while I was growing up. I really enjoyed them (not surprising, since I’m a librarian). Even though we have Britannica online in my library kids still use the paper World Book.
I had both World Book and Funk & Wagnalls at various times in my life, pre-Wiki.
My wife and I are in our 60s. My parents had an encyclopedia set when I was growing up. My wife’s parents had one as well. No idea how either set was purchased.
We’ve never owned one ourselves.
Several of various ages and quality. My favorite was the Encyclopedia Britannica from the late 1950’s. It was originally for my mother and her brothers but I got it when my grandmother didn’t want them around anymore. That was one expensive set of books even back then. It came with it’s own custom hardware cabinet to store them in. Even though they were old when I got them, I still got lots of good use out of them. It was one of the best general reference sources available pre-web and quite well done. It must have taken a huge amount of expert manpower to compile the whole thing.
We also got a cheap set from the local supermarket. They only offered a volume or two at a time so you had to keep buying them week after week to complete the whole set. They weren’t any Encyclopedia Britannica but each volume wasn’t that expensive either. It was a clever marketing ploy. It didn’t seem like that much money if your parents bought them for you one letter at a time.
We had (well my parents still have) the 1985 World Book Encyclopedia set, along with about 5 years of annual updates. Those are more of “here’s what happened this year” rather than “we have more info on section X to tell you about.”
They were informative and were almost always the first thing I went to for researching a topic before hitting the library. I liked them much better than Britannica.
Funk & Wagnalls, I’ll bet. That’s how I got my set.
Funk & Wagnalls, bought at the grocery store one letter at a time, when I was a kid. They had a different letter every month for like, two years.
I’m in my thirties.
Like other folks, we had an edition of the World Book when I was growing up–it must have been from sometime in the 1970s. I used to read them for fun, long before wikipedia made pleasure-reading of encyclopedias cool. My parents bought them, obviously, but I have no idea how much they cost, how they went about it, or whether they had to deal with a pushy salesman.
My folks bought the World Book along with its companion Childcraft series back when I was in 3rd grade, circa 1964, and I devoured Childcraft and moved on to the Encyclopedias. Best investment in my education they ever made, even ahead of their decision to pay for my med school tuition!
We had two sets when I was a kid (1970s):
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One was a fairly thin set of volumes, of some obscure brand. We’d gotten them, a book at a time, as a promotional item at a local grocery store (Jewel).
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We also had a set of Grolier encyclopedias, which I think we’d bought at a garage sale (they were probably 8 or 10 years out of date when we bought them).
I have a 1999 Encyclopedia Americana and a 2009 Encyclopedia Britannica, both purchased at library book sales. And we had at least three encyclopedia sets purchased from salesmen by my mother when we were growing up.
My mom bought the World Book Encyclopedia in the mid 60’s from a door-to-door salesman. It was a great investment, as my two sisters and I read those books for fun all the time.
My parents also bought Funk & Wagnalls at the grocery store for us, in the 80s, one book at a time. I enjoyed looking at them. I remember realizing how they already were going out of date when I was a kid, before computers. Europe seemed to be changing every day, and the fall of the USSR made a lot of stuff obsolete.
I have no doubt that my dad decided they needed to buy us the set because of “Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls” being a catch phrase on Laugh-In. If the grocery store was selling something else, I bet we wouldn’t have gotten it.
I think my parents bought us Sesame Street books at the grocery store, too.
Have a 1975 Britannica that my mom got for me in high school. Travel a lot for work and decided five years ago to read it cover to cover. Just finished the 23rd vol. I should be done next summer sometime.
I had one that my local library was discarding, because they had no need for it anymore. It was probably a duplicate of something they already had.
My parents bought us an Encyclopedia America in the early 1950s. I much preferred and devoured their Lincoln Library of Essential Information. Have no idea where it came from.
As a young adult, I fell pray to buying a set of encyclopedias about 1968. Colliers I think. We also bought Cutco knives. Those were the hay day of selling door to door.
When I was growing up in the 60s (meaning, b. 1960), we had a full set of the Brittanica. I pored over those books. We lived in a very intellectually impoverished area in Upper Appalachia, so those books presented ideas and areas of thought and places and just so many things I would never have had access to until I grew up and left.
I can still remember specific articles and photos. Picture stories about polio, and Madagascar, and the planets and sun. It was truly a fantastic journey.
I wish, in retrospect, that I had gotten a set like that when my son was little. He is wedded to electronic representation, of course, but I bet it would have really gone over when he was younger.
Great topic, btw.