Encyclopaedia Britannica
I will soon be picking up a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica circa 1968 from the City of Newton Reusable Materials Exchange. I could be like the Encyclopaedia Britannica kid of the ’80s saying, “Hi, remember me? I had a report due on space.” (And if you DON’T remember him, you can view the commercial here.)
Anyway, I am incredibly excited about this set of encyclopedias. I loved encyclopedias as a kid. Our school library had tons of encyclopedia sets. Online encyclopedias are cool, but nothing was more fun to me than browsing through a particular letter in an Encyclopaedia Britannica.
I’m particularly excited about owning a set of outdated encyclopedias, as odd as that sounds. I can’t wait to see their outdated medical terminology (although it would be more interesting if it was an even older set and had words like “lunatic” and “idiot” as technical terms for the mentally ill) and mentions of countries like East Germany, West Germany, Yugoslavia, the USSR, etc, etc, etc.
Wow, I think I might be slightly nerdy.
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Nothing nerdy about it at all. I love my encyclopedias and almanacs. I have thousands of them! You can just pick any letter and imagine time and place. It’s a weird thing, but you just know context better when you know what they were thinking about stuff before you were born. My newsest Brit set is 1970, but I’ve got a ton of World Book up to ‘81. My almanacs are just piling up. Oh, and Childcraft. Anyway, the point being, that my kiddo has to look stuff up in a book as she navigates history — and then I supplement it with looking at stuff in person.
But you just can’t beat a good book.
Good for you.
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That’s awesome! I just got a library card at the local public library (I was forced to…my college library is obscenely large if you want to do legal research or delve into some high academia, but woefully short on trade paperback fiction, haha) and found a full set of decades-old Britannicas for $10. And if I had a way of getting them all back to my apartment via the bus, I would have bought them on the spot. Encyclopedias are fun!
we talked about this before, but I remember having two sets of encyclopedias at home growing up in England. Both were from the 20’s and 30’s, and many entries were not very PC. However, I spent many hours reading history sections. Now that the web is cool I wonder if we have seen the last of the great encyclopedias?
I hope not.
The kid in that ad always reminded me of River Phoenix.