Free weights
So you may need a 1960s-style death ray.
My mother still has our old Encyclopedia Americana from the 60s. Out-of-date reference books are always fascinating.
mm
Straightening up the back storage rooms of the college library, we found an old Britannica that defined uranium as a worthless white metal.
When I was a kid, we had the Encyclopedia Americana and another one that was white. I think it was Funk & Wagnalls but it was one that my parents acquired a volume at a time from the supermarket. (Back then, you could get encyclopedias or a set of dishes from the supermarket, a piece each week.) I always wanted the Britannica but it was too expensive for us.
I especially remember the plastic overlays showing human anatomy that were in the encyclopedias back then.
And I just remembered. I graduated from college in 1988 and around then the school library was selling off old books, including a set of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which I should have bought.
Wrong. It’s Encyclopædia Britannica. Try typing that!
I can type that when my typewriter jams.
Even as a little girl (5 in '65), I got certain strong, physical feelings from certain things–which, upon growing up I realized constituted a fetish.
I remember going over and over some of the entries and their accompanying pictures, in our family set, always getting a little thrill that was imperfectly understood. Some entries and sections I can remember clearly, but I’m sure if I had the books again I would be able to wax… nostalgic… over many more.
How’s that–give me the books to forward the existence and celebration of kink. Actually, though, don’t really give me the books because I can’t house them either but I wanted to see if I could win this contest.
I always wanted to stage a good, old-fashioned book burning.
How many planets were there in the solar system back in those days? That’s a good judge of how useless an encyclopaedia is, I think.
Does it list Neil Armstrong as being anybody of note?
Did I win yet?
RNATB is “ahead” with “would look kind of cool in my law office.”
See, this is the problem. I might be able to bring myself to just recycle them, if I could just take them somewhere. But having to tear the covers off first would be physically painful. I barely managed it with some of my outdated textbooks.
This is all my mother’s fault, for teaching me to value books and cats.
I have enjoyed reading them. Seriously, start at A and end at Z. I used to have a copy of the c.1992 edition, and there was always a volume around with a bookmark in it. Took me about three years to work through it.
My mother tells me that I used to read one of my sisters to sleep by reading aloud to her whatever article of the World Book Encyclopedia I happened to be on at the time.
My mother hates cats. I had to get into cats on my own.
But the textbook thing, yeah, tearing the covers off of books is sometimes a heartbreak. I was a college prof and got a lot of evaluation copies over the years. Those aren’t too bad getting rid of. Especially in Computer Science where the useful lifespan of a book is so short. Not good for anything but pulp to anyone. But my own books that I bought or that I taught out of for years are another thing.
I’m also another “read the EB for fun as a kid” doper. My mother still brings this up as an example of how unusual I was.
ma that’s how i got so smart.
I dunno who’s gonna win…but I got’s me an idea for a contest:
Somebody here should use the OP’s set to do a 1965 re-rerun of the know-it-all.*
(and how did we get to 37 posts about the Britannica without mentioning it?) 
*(It’s a cute book by a guy who read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z, and tried to work his new knowledge into day-to-day conversations.(not always successfully!).Doing it with 1965-era info would be even more challenging.
I’ve got my grandad’s 1929 edition, complete with his nameplate in the front (which was a company courtesy/perk, I think). He bought a beautiful double-sided bookscase in which to keep them, but I hauled enough stuff across the Atlantic; my brother kept the bookcase.
Once the uni gets my office space situation sorted out, they’re going to take up precious shelf space; I have a colleague who wants to use them as primary source material for his research on Britain between the wars!
I had a set of Childcraft encyclopedias when I was a kid that were from the late 1950s and I again want to read the phrase “Someday man will travel to the moon.”
We had the late 1950’s version. How can you be bored? Before iphones and tablets we had Britanica and treehouses!