Encyclopedia Britannica

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.

The freebies on the web - have killed it.
It put up a good fight - though.

We had the free Funk & Wagnall's fom the grocery store.

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'm a great atlas and road-map fan, too.

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.

A nostalgic look at encyclopedias in today's paper too.

A nostalgic look at encyclopedias in todays paper too.

Edited by: bjd because of the apostrophe in the first message

A friend of mine sold encyclopedias door-to-door for a couple of days. She says she had some success but hated it. The idea was to guilt trip the parents, who really had better things to do with what little money they had. Did they want their children to be failures?

I'd forgotten about that sales pitch. When I was in my last year of college, about a couple of weeks before graduation, some encyclopedia company came to town. They targeted graduating seniors--come to an off-campus presentation and get a free book. My roommates & I signed up for the heck of it and for the free book.

The presentation was a heavy duty pitch for the encyclopedia. They used a sales model that was rather antiquated--the idea that right after graduation everyone was going to get married and start having kids and why not be prepared? (Sure. This was the late 1960s and most college students were no longer in the postwar mindset). Besides, the books will be so helpful in your future employment. (I was a science major. I didn't think an encyclopedia was exactly useful in a laboratory.) It will be some much cheaper to buy it now. "Cheaper" was a relative term. It was a couple of hundred dollars, which was a lot of money back then.

We were able to refrain from laughing too hard and finally got away with our free books. The book was an awful cookbook, also circa 1955. They must have been trying ot get rid of the unsold cases in some warehouse. I still have it because it's laughably terrible and and is a reminder of that sales pitch.

Yes, we had a set of the Grolier's Book of Knowledge, which I raptly read.

Maybe wikipedia should put links to half a dozen randomly chosen wiki pages at the bottom of every article, to make up for the fact that you can't come across random interesting articles in wikipedia the way you could paging through a physical encyclopedia. Hyperlinks can get you pretty far afield, but it's not the same.

It's sad news about the Britannica (but understandable).

I thought about it several times, sitting in my rocking chair, and looking at the bookcase containing Britannica and my National Polish Encyclopaedia. Each time I wondered 'what's the future?', when there is google and Wikpedia.
I think, it will stay there, and just look pretty.

The Chicago Public Library used to have an immense collection of foreign-language books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias; among the latter was the Большая советская энциклопедия, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

I consulted that source once after overhearing a conversation in English between my Russian grandmother and my mother. I thought my grandmother had said "Mrs. Stravinsky," but when I asked if I had heard her correctly she said no, she had said "Mrs. Trevinsky." (My mother told me the spelling.) When I asked "Do you know who Stravinsky was?" my grandmother replied "A singer."

"He wasn't a singer," I said, "He was a composer." Her disdainful reply: "The father, not the son." I had never heard of Fyodor Ignatievich Stravinsky, but my illiterate grandmother had.

I used to think that books were long lived items, had a long shelf life so to speak. This was once true, new information was discovered so infrequently. Today's information society has resulted in rapid updates of information, giving them a short shelf life.

Old books remain an important source of information about the past. They were build to last. Modern books with a short shelf life are not.

Even though I haven't used an encyclopedia in years, I was sorry to hear that Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer produce a print edition. I felt the same way about the end of Kodachrome.

Did anyone else grow up with the Encyclopedia Brown books? He was a kid who solved mysteries, and he was so smart that everyone called him Encyclopedia. I introduced my son to the books several years ago, and he enjoyed them as much as my brother and I did.

I have a beautiful 1993 fake leather Britannica in 33 volumes, which I bought second-hand in 1994 for about £1000. I disagree with Vinny -- I think the Micropædia/Macropædia idea works very well, once you get used to it. I've spent many an hour browsing through it, and now my little boy is starting to take an interest.

When I saw the news, my first thought was "Buy one! -- the last edition will be worth millions in a few decades". Then I realised that owning one Britannica is already odd enough -- two Britannicas would take me off the scale.