Oh God yes! I learned about it from The Dope a few years ago and spent many hours there. It definitely is addictive. Very hard to tear yourself away.
If you land in the middle of nowhere, your only hope is to keep going down a road until you at come upon a sign or truck with some writing on it so you can see what the local language is-- or the local alphabet anyway. As often as I played, I rarely landed in cities. It’s amazing how much rural South Africa, Australia, and South Texas look alike.
Among her many jobs, my mom sold Wold Book Encyclopedias. I read our free set, cover to cover, mostly in bed at night.
My father and grandfather were serious bibliophiles. Dad’s library was floor to ceiling on all 4 walls plus a number of oak and glass bookcases spread throughout the house. He had complete sets of many multi-volume books, including Great Books of the Western World, American Heritage, etc. Also a number of encyclopedias, including the one much lampooned by Rowan & Martin: Funk and Wagnalls.
Dad had nearly every volume of National Geographic Magazine. Pop Pop started the collection in 1889, the year after its first publication. Dad had them all indexed and leather-bound, by year (which actually decreased their value because the binder removed all the ads).
I just wanted to read Archie comic books.
OK, I did read a lot of the science and nature encyclopedias and books…and, of course, looked at all the naked National Geo pics. [blush]
I started off by reading the dictionary, and then when Mom sprang to get the Brittanica, I read that, too. Even better: It came with a shelf-ful of the Great Works of History, and I read a lot of those, too.
I’m one of very few people who considered Euclid’s Elements to be leisure reading. Some of the propositions, I asked “Why didn’t they present it to us this way in my geometry class?”, while others, I found errors in (Euclid’s final proposition, incidentally, was one of these).
We had a Funk & Wagnalls, as well as How it Works: The New Illustrated Science and Invention Encyclopedia. The latter is still taking up a shelf at my place. It’s undoubtedly pretty out of date at this point, but I probably read through every one as a kid.
Today we would call that a “depth-first search”.
No backtracking, though.
Remember those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books? I’d do a depth-first search of all the endings, but I used my fingers as bookmarks so I could backtrack. Could get kinda tricky at times…
Yes he did. Read again the part that I quoted.
He just says he moves to the next unread reference in the current article, without saying that he pops the current article off the stack if he runs out of references. Arguably, depth-first doesn’t apply at all here since it’s not a tree–it’s a directed graph. One could conceivably reach every article without any backtracking using that method, but it’s not very likely.
Why quibble? Let’s ask The Man himself! @Voyager , did you backtrack?
This is what I most remember about World Books. We also had the Childcraft books and I loved those.
I read all the cards of both the original and the second edition of Trivial Pursuit when I was about 8-10 years old. That, combined with my mother being a teacher, has given me a vast number of completely useless facts to clog up my brain when I need an actually useful fact.
THIS! We had the subscription to the series, so we got them as they were published. The Mathematics book was my favorite! I had that book nearly memorized.
My second-favorite was The Mind, especially the parts about mental illness. Something about that grotesquely fascinated me, including the artwork by famous schizophrenics. It had pictures of the Inferno panel from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and The Maze by William Kurelek, and a picture of a very spikey-looking cat. Oh, and of course The Scream by Edvard Munch.
We had Childcraft too, and I loved it - a nice companion to the World Book.
I’d love to reread some of those Childcraft volumes. WB too, but I think I’d be blown away most by restored memories and emotions associated with the Childcraft series.
We had a set of blue “The New Book Of Knowledge” from 1988-ish, it had article-styled entries that were less “formal” than the red “Children’s Brittanica” we also had from 1989-ish.
Also had a red 24 book set of The World Of Science that was fantastic.
About 38 years ago I picked up a set of 1942 Britannica (pretty sure that’s right) at a library book sale and was transported to a different time where Israel didn’t exist, Viet Nam was still Cochin China, and on and on. Just fascinating. I finally let go of those and the 1960s World Books I’d grown up with but I still miss them.
This entire thread hits home. All of it. Reading encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, Childcraft, etc. And lots more besides.
My grandparents had a late-1950s set of World Books:
Articles I remember well from these volumes were:
When I was about 11 or 12, some family friends gave our family a full set of Funk & Wagnalls 1970 set:
These were almost like a mini-encyclopedia, as each volume was roughly a 6" x 9" hardback. Still a ton to devour, but perhaps the articles were more abridged than I knew at the time. I remember reading a lot of geographical and demographic information out of these. It always cited the 1960 Census for the populations of American cities, so I have those figures roughly memorized to this day. Still weird to me that Chicago is well below 3 million now, and how big various Sun Belt cities have gotten. Back then, cities like Cleveland and Detroit dwarfed Dallas and Phoenix – today, the reverse it true.
Around the same time, my mom got the first five of these F&Ws, plus a matching two-volume dictionary that I probably did read cover-to-cover over time:
One thing I specifically remember learning from this dictionary was the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet – they had a comparative alphabet chart near the entry for alphabet. Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic all side by side.
I could write all night about the memorable reference books I read as a kid. Over time, it was a direct path to books like the first two Straight Dope compendiums (to this day, in my head, they’re identified by color – the “Black book” and the “Yellow book”). And the rest is history.
I loved looking at the flags of the world, too.
I love reading old reference books for exactly this reason. They’re like mini-time machines in your hands.