We had the American People’s Encyclopedia, known in our house as “the APE.” My mother frequently told me and my brother, “If you want to know about that, go ask the APE.”
My dad was a professor and he loved books. We had so many bookshelves in the house. And we had 2 encyclopedia sets, World Book for the 5 kids, and Brittanica for the parents.
I loved looking something up, and then looking up a 2nd thing that related to the 1st, then a 3rd thing that related to the 2nd, and so on, and so on…
My parents used to buy me books with titles like ‘5001 Amazing Facts!’ - I think maybe to shut me up, as I was always asking questions. I consumed them voraciously. Some of the facts in the books were false (one said ‘the human heart is actually mostly on the right side of the body’ - and I think they really did mean ‘stage right’, not ‘house right’), but the net effect of reading these books was to go and look things up, and research them further if they didn’t seem to make sense.
We had similar books. I would read them over and over. Same with the World Records books that came out every year. I loved them. We also had a set of animal books. Each volume, there were at least 15) covered a different type of animal - big cats, birds, reptiles, etc. I poured over those numerous times. I can still see certain pictures in my mind.
When I was a kid, there were always offers to get the first volume for $1, and then they’d send you a new volume each month. But you were also able to cancel after that first $1 volume. My mom bought a lot of reference-type books like this. Sure we only had the first volume, but they were interesting and I read them all the time. They had lots of cool pictures in them too.
So are you now an expert on everything that begins with A?
I remember how anemic the XYZ volume always looked. If I was an encyclopedia editor, I’d insist that my contributors pad out their articles on xylophones, Yakuza, and zebras.
We had several volumes of “Charlie Brown’s Super Book of Questions and Answers” (in addition to the World Book encyclopedia and an unabridged dictionary). I remember some of the questions seemed kind of out of left field for a little kid, like “How does lithography work?”
Wikiwalking before there was a Wiki.
SunSon has had his share of medical issues while growing up. At one point, he had positive diagnoses for arthritis, asthma, and autism*.
My dry sense of humor came out when I told SunWife we should get a subscription to the Pediatric Medical Encyclopedia and just cancel after the first volume arrives.
* Not a disease, of course, but still something that gets diagnosed. He’s really closer to Asperger’s, like his old man, but they removed that category a little before we got him evaluated.
Where’s my Funk & Wagnall’s homies at?
Thank you for this reminder of my youth, I completely forgot about these books, I may have only had one, but I remember that cover.
Ours was the Espasa Calpe, must have had 25 volumes. Checking Ebay now, there were editions with over 100 volumes!
Post 78 - complete with photo!
I, too, surfed the encyclopedias.
Yes and it often led to me chasing down into some strange rabbit holes, as in @DesertDog’s diagram. After awhile I’d wonder, How did I end up here? And sometimes I didn’t remember.
So did we! It was oriented to younger readers and I totally enjoyed it as a kid. IIRC, it wasn’t organized like a conventional encyclopedia, but rather, it had lots of comprehensive articles on a broad range of subjects. However, according to this, you could use it as an encyclopedic reference tool because it had an innovative and very thorough index, but the unique organization made it more fun to read than a strictly regimented encyclopedia. I have fond memories of spending lots of time with it as a kid and I regret that after I grew older and left home, my parents gave it away.
We also had a dictionary that I liked to look through for some reason. It belonged to my older brother and even when I was a kid it was already a bit dated. It had a section called “new words”, which they included as a separate section because they were words that were in use but not yet well established in the language. It turned out that almost all of them came from the lingo of World War II, and many or most had long fallen out of use by the time of my dictionary explorations.
Hahaha! Most of them weren’t A-Z type books. I remember one was about organized crime - Al Capone, etc. There was also one about how famous criminals met their demise. I can still see in my mind the picture of someone in an electric chair. That book was creepy but very interesting. And probably very inappropriate for a 10-year-old! But those were the days.
When I was 13 years old (early 1980s), my mother gave me the American Heritage Dictionary. I was fascinated by the etymologies, especially the ones that went back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots. For about a year, I would read random bits of the dictionary on many mornings. The appendix was a list of the PIE roots, with all the English words that derived from each, via Germanic or Latin, etc. I learned to see words in a new way, connected by semantic and phonological threads. (One example I pass on to my students is “scissors,” “science,” and “shit,” all about cutting and setting apart).
Decades later, around age forty, I read Carl Darling Buck’s 1949 “A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages,” cover-to-cover. (This was a new reprint, with four of the original pages reproduced on each page). Basically like the American Heritage PIE appendix, but: 1. Much more complete, with words from all of the known IE languages, from Hittite to modern Irish, Lithuanian, Farsi, etc, etc, etc.; 2. Arranged not alphabetically, but instead semantically! For example, a section on “emotions” (with sub-sections for “hope,” “despair,” etc.), or another on “landscape features,” etc. Riveting! Yet, I’m well aware that not everyone loves this stuff like we do.
At the supermarket my mother bought me some wonderful books. Things like Sherlock Holmes, or Jules Verne all in the original (translated) text. In the margins all the obscure words were defined. I got a lot out of those.