Funk and Wagnalls, a company well known in the late 60s from their mentions on prime time television, published a complete encyclopedia with 20 something volumes, but I also recall they had a 2 volume condensed version. (Possibly I am only remembering their 2 volume dictionary)
Old encyclopedias do have value. They are an accurate snapshot of the world at a particular time. For example, if you want to know what scientists knew about DNA in 1964, you could easily find that in an encyclopedia from that year. So for anyone interested in relatively recent history, old encyclopedias can be an extremely valuable source, even if they aren’t up to date or online.
I graduated from college in the Spring of 1988 and I remember that the university library was having a book sale, at which they were selling a complete set of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. I didn’t get it because of a lack of space, but I still regret that decision.
I haven’t purchased a set of encyclopedias for our school library in over a decade. The school system has access to Britannica online, and it is continuously being updated. Even our oldest students (8th grade) have no memory of a set of encyclopedias that take up a couple of shelves in the library.
Mild hijack; are you a school librarian? If so, what instructions do the kids get about using Wikipedia as a source?
Same here. My parents had a used set of World Book that I love to read repeatedly. And they got a used set of Funk & Wagnalls which I read too (not as much as World Book though!!)
Speaking of World Book my parents had their sister series Childcraft – The How and Why Library. which was great as well. Anyone else remember THAT?
Yes, I am. I tell them that it can be a good starting point, but like other resources it’s a good idea to verify it. The thing is that they learn about so many great resources that are available both through the school and public libraries that Wikipedia starts looking less good to them. For instance, the Spanish teacher sent groups down to get basic info about various people for Hispanic Heritage Month. Most started with Biography.com, which was perfect for the assignment. One kid had a former Nobel Prize winner who wasn’t there, so I got her on the site of the Nobel folks and she got what she needed. None of the kids used Wikipedia. Part of it is no doubt the fact that I’ve built up a high level of trust with our students over the years; if I tell them it’s snowing in July they know to go buy a shovel.
I’ve found Wikipedia to be reasonably reliable, and there are often references listed at the bottom of the article you can check out. Still, I would never use it as my single source of information. Getting broad strokes before diving into the details elsewhere it is a good starting place. It’s a fast and easy way to learn basic facts about something. However, if you are writing a high school term paper, let alone something for college, find resources that will hold up better to the scrutiny of teachers and professors.
My parents had two encyclopedias. I think one was the World Book Encyclopedia, including a small, two-shelf bookcase designed to hold the whole thing. I can’t remember the name of the second encyclopedia but it was hardbound in white and we acquired it over time from a supermarket. (In the 1970s and perhaps the 1980s, if your purchases at the supermarket exceeded, say, fifty bucks, you could buy another volume of the encyclopedia for a small amount, say two or three dollars. Sometimes, instead of an encyclopedia, the supermarket was offering a set of dinnerware or pots and pans you could acquire over time.)
I always wanted them to get the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was the post prestigious one, but it was really expensive, like a thousand dollars, and that was a lot of money back then.
And my favorite part of the encyclopedia was the section on human anatomy with the acetate overlays showing different parts of the body.
I got mine for something like $1 as the prize for joining the Book-of-the-Month Club. They probably got millions that way.
It’s interesting to note that not only are print encyclopedias dead; so are their direct successors, encyclopedias on a physical data storage medium. They enjoyed only a brief lifespan; I remember having a CD-ROM edition of Microsoft Encarta in the late 1990s, and one of the Britannica in the mid-2000s. All history now, replaced by online editions that are continuously updated.
Yeah, I had (still got it somewhere on the shelves in my computer room, I’m sure) a CD-ROM (as they were called at the time) of the Bertelsmann Lexikon, which already was multi-medial with sound and video snippets, around 1995. I don’t remember using it much, and a short time later I had internet and never looked back.
Encyclopedias (and books of lists and trivia) were the pre-Internet version of time-killing random browsing.
A related question: I remember that the printed Britannica was divided into two parts, a “micropedia” with brief articles of the usual sort you’d expect in an encyclopedia, and a “macropedia” with lengthier (sometimes dozens or even > 100 of pages, almost textbook-style) in-depth articles presenting a given topic in more detail, often authored by an eminent expert in the field. Does the paid-access online version maintain this structure?
We had an old set when I was a kid (60s-70s). I think it was World Book and probably from the 40s. I used them all the time for school assignments/reports. No one ever told me they were out of date! I loved looking through them. I must have looked at the dog breeds and horse breeds a thousand times. I still identify breeds by thinking back to those pictures.
The version we have access to has Elementary, Middle School, and High School levels. It’s not the same as that structure, but the high school level articles for a country or state can get pretty long. For instance, the entry for Switzerland is 43 pages long.