Something just reminded me of encyclopedias, and I was surprised to see the Brittanica still sells bound print ones (for a whopping $1400).
Did you ever own a set of encyclopedias? Do you now own encyclopedias?
We owned Funk & Wagnells, which we bought copy by copy at safeway or something. They were lame. But, I always liked big heavy encyclopedia volumes in the library, and would almost like to have a set now, even though they are outdated artifacts of olde
Britannica
brown.
I’ve got a Children’s Britannica that my dad bought when we were kids. My dad’s still got the grown-ups’ Britannica, he’s offered them to me but I’ve got nowhere to keep them at the moment. They’re beautiful books, even if their intended function has been more or less superseded.
I somehow inherited the World Book set that my parents provided for my brothers and me back in the day. Being the youngest, it was pretty dated by the time I got to high school, but I used it to no end. The books are still good for historical references and look nice and all on the shelf—most definitely used though—probably the one possession from childhood that’s still around. Many texts have come and gone, but these books, worthless to most, are keepers to me.
Britannica, wonderful.
We had a very nice set of Collier’s Encyclopedia when I was a kid, but they got ruined by water damage in the 80s. A couple of years ago when I was buying up old books to make a fortune on the internets, I wound up with three crappy old sets. One, incomplete, got tossed. The other two got donated to the Salvation Army.
i’m more apt to associate the word “encyclopedia” with Encyclopedia Brown these days than the real definition
I believe the thread title should be “Encyclopediae”
Encyclopaediae
In Cyclops’ beady eye