Were you one of those nerdy kids who curled up on the sofa reading a random volume of the encyclopedia just for pleasure? Did you go to the library and look up stuff for your school projects?
Those times are coming ot an end. Encyclopedia Britannica ends print, goes digital
Side note--if you are an American of a certain age, "encyclopedia" was probably the first big word you learned how to spell. And you probably find yourself singing when you spell it. Jiminy Cricket taught you
"...curled up on the sofa reading a random volume of the encyclopedia just for pleasure?"
I remember that being one of my usual activities on lazy weekday afternoons, just taking a random volume to flip through it. What was a bit of a PITA was finding an interesting term or a word you didn't know and then having to go and grab the appropriate volume to consult that word. Sometimes I would have 6 or 7 different volumes piled up on the floor after one of those reading sessions. I could really have used hyperlinks back then.
I don't think I ever read the Britannica though, we had two general encyclopedias at home but both were Spanish: the Espasa-Calpe and the Barsa, and also the Diccionario Enciclopédico Salvat, which was a dictionary/encyclopedia hybrid. The Salvat was in the dictionaries bookcase though, next to María Moliner and RAE.
I was just wondering last week whether to get rid of my copy,1962 edition, which I got for $20 or so, includng bookcase, at a yard sale in the 1970s. Except for the atlas I haven't opened it in years. And the atlas not very often.
The Micropedia/Macropedia thing was a big mistake, but I doubt it would have lasted longer if they hadn't abandoned alphabetical order.
I didn't read encyclopedias at home because we didn't have a set, but I did like to read dictionaries -- looking up one word often sent me off looking for another. And I still like atlases and have a bunch of them.
I was one of those nerdy kids. My parents bought a set of encyclopedias for my brothers and me when I was about eight, and I loved reading them. They were published by Grolier, not Britannica, and I think that a door-to-door salesman was the one who persuaded my parents to buy them.
An interesting, anti-nostalgic take down of Britannica was posted on Slate the other day.
While Manjoo goes much further than I would in extolling the virtues of crowd-sourcing, some of his criticisms hit home. My parents had (still have, in fact) a mid-century set of Britannica, but its utility to me as a schoolchild was extremely limited given the fusty academic prolixity of its articles (at least, in that era). It's kind of interesting as relic of its day--how many of the people or things deemed article-worthy in 1955 have now disappeared under the sands of time a la Ozymandias?--but the world has marched on. It really makes no sense at all to continue with any encyclopedia in print form. Even the OED--a vastly more useful resource--has gone paperless.
