It still exists; the card catalogues are gone, but the shelves are still organized that way, and the computer will refer you to its numbers.
Well, that makes sense, since it was (and I guess still is) a brilliant way to organize a library. I just wander the fiction stacks when I go to the library, so hadn’t noticed it was still in play.
So that’s what the slot is for! It was long gone by the time we got the set. That bookcase definitely came with the encyclopedias.
Having encyclopedias in the house was a large part of my education. I used them all the way through high school as a starting point for school reports, augmenting them with library books. But they were so much more. My brother and I would both grab a volume and just start reading, and one topic would lead to another. I’d spend large chunks of time reading them, and since I preferred fiction for leisure reading, they were where I learned a lot about nonfiction topics.
As someone said above, reference books couldn’t be checked out if the library, and my mom didn’t have the time to spend hours at the library. If we hadn’t had the books, I wouldn’t have had that experience. So, yes, encyclopedias were legit, regardless of how they were sold.
i had the the 1986 world book set with childcraft books my step grandpa bought them and since I was a voracious reader I would read through the entire set at least every week or so …
there were add on books but since we acrimounsly moved they didn’t keep up with them …
Anybody know why the XYZ volume was a bridge too far for Evel Knievel’s Stunt Cycle?
The guy I used to work for had a particular, regular habit of complaint which I eventually decided to label ‘this summary is not very detailed, is it?’ - he would, when presented with a detailed report, reject it and demand a one page summary, complaining that he hadn’t the time to read ten pages of rambling detail.
On being presented with the requested summary, he would spend a whole day questioning, picking, pointing out that we had neglected this or that small detail (which had been in the original document, which would not have taken a whole day to read).
We never had an encyclopaedia at home, but there was one in my school library and I used to dip into it a lot. One thing that encyclopaedias are very good for, that I don’t think the Web has really surpassed, is aimless browsing - we call it ‘browsing’ the Internet, but we’re not often just taking an undirected wander through online information, especially since content has bece more and more algorithm-curated.
You can find a lot more, better, more complete and detailed information on any topic online than you ever could in a set of printed books, but you generally have to be explicitly looking for it first, or else you have to be in a situation where someone else has a motive for you to see that information. You can’t really just leaf through the Internet at your own pace and direction.
You can go down rabbit holes of linked information. You can subscribe to curated feeds that are supposedly random (but aren’t, really), but you can’t just accidentally fall upon new information so readily as could when just flipping pages of a set of books.
I am not a frequent poster but this thread brought back some memories.
I am one who grew up before the internet. We had an old set (maybe early 60’s) of Britanica. We also had a more recent copy of Compton’s. I don’t know how or when my folks bought them. What i do know is I spent a lot of time with them both. Compton’s sent an annual update for new information on old subjects and new, current events. I looked forward to that delivery every year and spent hours reading it.
I suppose one significant problem with printed encyclopaedias is that, being generally valuable books, people hung on to them, and this probably contributed to the perpetuation of incorrect or out of date information. I remember, in a set owned by my parents in law, reading some bits of geology or cosmology (I forget the exact detail but it might have been theories about why the sun, or the earth’s core is hot) and thinking ‘wow, that’s just wrong’, but of course it was the prevailing theory until just after the books were printed.
When I was 11 years old, my High School teacher that year gave us a weekly homework assignment that he called “Find Outs”. He’d ask us twenty trivia questions where the answers all began with a specific letter of the alphabet.
It was his way to teach us about how to use reference books, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias, which my family had a whole bunch of, both adult- and child-oriented.
It was one of my favourite things to do each weekend, and instilled in me an interest in that kind of researching that continues to this day.
Chiming it as another who remembers this, and still sings the song to myself when I write (or type) the word.
I grew up with the World Book encyclopedia (yes, I just sung the word!). I have a (very) vague recollection of a salesman being at our apartment and Dad deciding that as I was going to starting school in another year it might be a good idea to get it. I think we had some of the yearbooks, too.
One of the things I bought after I paid off my college loan (yes, in the 70s it was possible to actually do this within 10 years) was to buy not only the Encyclopedia Britannica and sign up for the yearbooks, but also the Great Books of the Western World set. The Encyclopedia is long gone (I think I actually found someone to buy it) but I still have the Great Books. One day I may actually read some of them.
The closest thing I’ve found to that is browsing these boards.
Didn’t Wikipedia at one time have a sort of randomized button on the home page that let you learn stuff serendipitously? That must have been recognized as something people missed about dead tree encyclopedias in the early days of the Internet (you know; the 2010s)
There is a school version of Britannica that also has links to vetted websites. I present it to students as a good starting point for research (which is what I did back in the days of paper encyclopedias as well). It also has separate elementary/middle school/high school sections.
There’s still a “Random” item in the main (hamburger) menu.
{Alt} {Shift} {X}
I never got in the habit of reading encyclopedias, even when I worked at a library. I would look through the Britannica at times but it just seemed dull.
My knowledge opiate of choice was the World Almanac and Book of Facts, a thousand page compendium of useful information, much of it numbers in table form. I bet I spent as much time going through that as any of you with your encyclopedias. And it was at least partly new and updated every year. All for only about a mere dollar.
When I was 6, my neighbors moved away. Their daughters were already in middle school and older, and no longer needed/used their encyclopedias, so they gave them to me.
I used them for many years, so I would have a head start when I got to the library. I think my parents kept them until I was in my mid-20s.
I can’t speak for your hometown, but our library support group sells off recent encyclopedia sets, a year or two old, from $40-120 depending on year and whether they are Brittanica or something less. The Brittanica’s usually give much better information than Wiki, except perhaps on the most recent topics, although they cover fewer subjects.
That could be a feature, if you were aware of it. I always found it fascinating to read what used to be believed and/or true. My parents had a two volume dictionary from the early 1930s. It had an atlas, and I loved to look at the boundaries of Europe back then, with East Prussia separated from the rest of Germany.
If my first brush at age 9 with the format was Britannica, it would have put me off encyclopedias forever. For all its deficiencies, World Book had the kind of visuals that would get a kid to read further on a subject.