Which, during the centenary, the current editors admitted was why they were there in the first place.
National Geographic magazine – the PornHub of its day.
I actually looked them up on ebay after I posted. This is the set I believe I had (it’s missing two, though). Those orange covers take me right back.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/125009668037?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&itemid=125009668037&targetid=1263433204934&device=c&mktype=&googleloc=9013526&poi=&campaignid=14859008593&mkgroupid=130497710760&rlsatarget=pla-1263433204934&abcId=9300678&merchantid=114990525&gclid=Cj0KCQiAw9qOBhC-ARIsAG-rdn7tJ_sYqCV6JKJMwjipVodUE9PnSq6ofQ0p6_0Dcn8wvteIhBN5ol8aAth8EALw_wcB
By virtue of inheriting it, I still have one of those which is at least 15 years older than me. I too found those overlays fascinating.
This has always bugged me. Anybody know why Evel Knievel could only jump over volumes A through W? And who puts a set of encyclopedias on the shelf left to right?
He didn’t have two more weeks to wait around for the grocery store to get volumes Y and Z.
Yes, I remember The Mind as well, and all those pictures!
I even wanted to be a psychologist for a while after I read it.
The spikey cat pictures were by Louis Wain. A new Amazon Prime movie, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain was released just a couple of months ago.
I also had a huge stack of the UK weekly magazine World of Wonder, published from 1970-1975. They had interesting articles about science, history, geography, literature, music, etc – a huge variety of subjects, and good articles and illustrations for children. I leaned a lot from them.
As a child, we lived too far from the nearest library for me to go there, at least until I got my first decent bike (and some autonomy) in 7th grade. But mom bought a Compton’s Junior Picture Encyclopedia for us around 2nd grade, and it was a window to the world. I learned to read (mom was a teacher) around age 3-4, so by 2nd grade, I could read anything I could find.
The Compton’s was a single-shelf set of books, half of what the Britannica was, but we couldn’t afford the Britannica. I still have the Compton’s in the basement.
The local library won’t accept encyclopedias for their annual book sale, as they can’t sell them for love or money. But I enjoy pulling it out occasionally and looking up topics where knowledge has moved forward considerably, like astronomy.
We used to have a 2-volume encyclopedia ca. 1910 vintage. I remember it didn’t have an entry for the planet Pluto, as it hadn’t been discovered (or downgraded) yet. Think about the limited knowledge of dinosaurs, plate tectonics, black holes, etc. 100 or even 50 years ago.
My parents bought an Encyclopedia Brittanica for the family, and with 5 kids doing reports for school, it was used a lot. But somewhere along the line, they also got an old set of encyclopedias (I don’t know whose) that were kept in the basement bathroom, of all places. Not only did it help pass the time, but it was interesting to discover what wasn’t in the old volumes.
I’ve been semi-tempted to buy old sets I see advertised, but I’ve resisted so far. Still, it would be fun.
Oh, and my mom was on Jeopardy back in the Art Fleming days when one of the consolation prizes was a set of encyclopedias - since we already had top-of-the-line, she donated her winnings to our school library. I’d love to see them now - 50 years later.
So you could look things up in your Funk & Wagnall’s? 
We had the World Book set - I think my parents still have them, despite the books being from 1973.
That rings a bell. And was very cool indeed.
A friend of mine had a geography book from around the 1890’s. It was interesting to peruse through. The writers certainly were not very politically correct.
A friend bought an old dictionary, perhaps from that time frame. It defined “star” as a dot of light in the sky. It also had a multi-page spread in the back of the “races of man”, with illustrations of about 40 races. (All adult males, of course.) For example, the Bantu were a race, and the Aryans were a race. Why no, the brief descriptions of those races were NOT politically correct. Although they did tend to focus on physical characteristics.
Hmmm…literal, perhaps, but hardly exhaustive. 
That was true in the 1958 World Book as well. I don’t recall any overt hate. It was just that many articles about individual countries showed photographs that distilled the citizens therein to stereotypes – usually rural Argentinians or Bulgarians or whatever that maintained older styles of dress, older customs, etc. Nothing wrong with being rural and/or traditional, or course … the point is that there seemed to be an (inadvertent?) effort to make “other places” seem as wildly different as possible from the U.S. It didn’t seem like other parts of the world had cities and towns like America’s, or necessarily had kids who grew up with experiences similar to mine.
I also remember an article about Race that showed stereotypical pictures of people from different parts of the world. IIRC, they grouped aboriginal Australians with sub-Saharan Africans.
My parents had a 1947 (I think) set of Encyclopedia Britannica and a 20 volume set of The Book of Knowledge, which was geared to children. I used to read the latter all the time when young and the former as I grew older. My sister taught me how to read at a very young age, and I was a regular at the local library.
My parents chose food and shelter over encyclopedias. I did enjoy flipping through them at the library.
World Book was published in Chicago. They used Malvina Hoffman’s sculptures at the nearby Field Museum for the various races, now reconsidered: sub-Saharan African = Australian = Papuan = generic “negriods.”
See, in that sense the even older dictionary was more accurate, with its ~40 races. They separated the Khoisan (they used a different word, but the word they used is a slur) from the Bantu. They certainly didn’t lump the Australians in with either of those groups. Although they probably organized the pictures approximately by skin tone.
Sure, I perused our Encyclopedias and Dictionary (a huge book on a stand) from time to time, but even back in the 1980’s, they felt old, man.
I have a much stronger memory of browsing Atlases. And I’m not the only one; my two best friends from Middle School and High School also did this. For us, it was an “entry point” into understanding what shaped the personalities and behaviors of nations, explained the ease (or difficulty) of waging war on others, explained how the world was explored, etc. Helped build an intuition of what it was like to be from a different place; i.e. who your neighbors are, how far away, what direction, where is the sea, etc.
This knowledge served me a lot during my early adult world travels. Made me much less of a newbie when meeting people from outside the USA (my home country).
The volume-at-a-time-from-the-grocery-store reference book that I remember from childhood is one I haven’t seen mentioned yet in this thread: the Charlie Brown Dictionary. I remember we had at least a volume or two, then we got the whole thing in a single volume.