I forgot about those. When writing my earlier post, I kept thinking there was something special about the H volume, but couldn’t put my finger on it.
We had Compton’s encyclopedia. I definitely dug into that when I wasn’t researching things. I was also a big fan of fact books and science books.
I grew up in a house that had been in the family for several generations. Our encyclopedia was the 1911 Britannica. I enjoyed reading it and finding all the things that had changed. It wasn’t all that useful for writing papers for class, though.
Same here, but we also got in various year books that I’d vacuum up as well as a library card early on.
My grandfather was a contractor and one of the homes he built was for Jane Werner Watson and her husband. When I was about ten we were visiting and he went there to do some sort of maintenance. I was turned loose in their library and wound up cross-legged on the floor with several books near by. She came in, we had a short conversation, and she gave me a copy of The World of Science. I’ve never looked back.
The home I grew up in had not just one but three sets of encyclopedias. I read all three.
I not only read an English dictionary, I used to read the first French dictionary I got.
I like to get lost in Wikipedia.
I am such a nerd…
We had a circa 1970 World Book encyclopedia set; I also had my own encyclopedia set – I think some edition of the Golden Book – and a full set of the Life Science Library. The Growth book was my parents’ way of giving me “the talk”.
We, too, had the grocery-store encyclopedia; when I got to be a bit older, my parents got me a “real” encyclopedia set (though it was a few years old) for a song at a garage sale.
I was a voracious reader as a kid, in the 1970s, and read everything I could get my hands on: in addition to the dictionary and encyclopedias, I was reading the newspaper every day, and my parents’ Time Magazine and Reader’s Digest (this is when I was about 8 or 9), as well as TV Guide, cereal boxes, etc., etc.
We had an encyclopedia called Book of Knowledge. It was in a bookcase by my bed and I read all the science related entries over a few years. I rarely consulted a dictionary.
I don’t recall this but my mother said by the time I was three, they were calling me “The why kid”. I haven’t really outgrown that.
We had the Funk and Wagnell’s set as a kid. I think most people buy them in grocery stores but ours showed up all at once one day. I loved it and would frequently pull it out to learn more about something or other. I was not the type to read the whole thing cover to cover but I’ll bet I read 5-10% of it. Lots of science articles but there was too much history and literature for me to want to read it all.
I also remember reading through various words in the dictionary. I distinctly remember reading one page where the header word was Quinquagesima Sunday. I have never forgotten that word even though I otherwise never heard of the holiday before or since.
Thanks, @Tabco, yes, those definitely count! You’re almost as literal-minded as I am. 
By “encyclopedia” I didn’t necessarily mean the big A-Z books that sat on a shelf in your home or at the library. I meant a collection of information that you browsed by some means or other because you were/are curious about stuff.
And we LOVE you for it! Your People are here.
After seeing the new thread that spawned this one, I was literally just thinking this last night - that the SDMB was an extension of my childhood curiosity.
Two of my favorite books as a kid were “101 Answers to Questions Children Have” (I think - something like that) and “They Changed the World” which was a collection of short bios of influential people from the past, across a wide spectrum.
My dad worked for Oxford University Press so we had lots of reference books at home, but I was always jealous of the kids who had “real” encyclopedias with illustrations, etc. We had a version the full OED, which came in two huge volumes, with four pages printed on each page. It came with a magnifying glass so you could actually read the very small print, so we used that more for amusement than for satisfying curiosity.
WHOA! For this crowd, that’s better than having a dad who worked for Hershey!
The Man and Space one is by Arthur C. Clarke, so Life used the best. I have the Dutch version - I don’t read Dutch, but I am a collector.
I think the encyclopedias that we had were the “World Book” encyclopedia, but I’m not sure, and my parents have gotten rid of them at this point.
They were 2 years older than I am, so some of the info was out of date by the time I read it. I thought that Sky Lab was still in space and still had years to go for quite a while after reading about it in those books.
But they were what I had, so I read the shit out of them. Geography and biographies were a bit boring, so I skipped most of those, unless they were of people or places I knew and were interested in.
My dad had a bunch of “All About” books that were from his childhood. I remember reading the “All About Nuclear Power” book, and it mentioned that fusion was about 50 years away. The copyright on the book was about 40 years old, so I thought that fusion was right around the corner. (I assume that they were not just a fever dream, anyway, I can find no contemporary reference to that series of books.)
When I got old enough to start riding my bike to the library, that’s where I ensconced myself for years for a slightly more up to date education. Couldn’t check out reference books, and in fact, couldn’t even get them off the shelves myself, had to ask for them at the reference desk. Eventually they got to know me well enough that they would let me just have 3 at a time, rather than me making them keep cycling through them one at a time.
I always wonder how things would have been had google and wikipedia been around then.
My parents got a World Book for us, and I read it straight through until about I. But I did something even weirder. Before links and hypertext were invented, I picked a random article and followed the first reference, read that, followed that first reference, read that, and so forth, moving to the next reference if I had read the first already. I went to many different subjects.
Yes I was a strange kid.
My favorite part of the encyclopedia was the anatomy. They had these cool cellophane overlays of the human body. First the skeleton, flip a page over then the arteries, flip another page over then the muscles, etc…
I think it was World Book.
That reminds me of the science textbooks we had in grade school, in the mid '70s. I was attending a small Catholic school, and they hadn’t bought new textbooks in a while; as a kid who was hugely interested in space exploration, I found it funny that, in 1976, I was reading a science book which was saying, “Someday soon, man will reach the moon.” 
We had the World Book, and I read it a lot, but never straight through.
My obsession as a very young child (which continues to today) was maps and atlases. Supposedly that started at 4 years old… I would read the National Geographic and Rand McNally atlases and pester the adults with strange facts or place names I found.
Then came the Exxon state road maps… I think I still know where that collection is.
THIS. I still love maps and atlases. Even street maps. I have an excellent sense of direction and always know where north, south, etc. are. (But I can’t readily tell right from left and even if I think about it, often get them wrong.) If Google Earth had been around when I was a kid, I’d never have stood up from the computer.
I got World Book (with Childcraft) back in 3rd grade and went through each volume of both sets multiple times. Can’t say I understood (or even read) everything, but I read and understood a lot.