Random
Goodbye to All That
When I was a kid, my mother assigned homework to my brothers and I in addition to any homework we may have been assigned in school. My mother’s homework was generally more of a priority. Some of her assignments came from Little Professor workbooks but most of her assignments came from the Encyclopedia Britannica, which she made us read, a lot. I have, in my lifetime, read the entire compendium. I know things.
My mother would give us a page range and we’d read and write little reports on what we learned. Other times we had to do assignments that reflected critical thinking—comparing and contrasting different topics, creating new entries or using existing entries as the starting point for a story or article of some kind. At times, I did not understand why we were being forced to read that stupid thing, but I know now—my mother wanted, in her way, for us to understand that knowledge is important, that knowledge is a tool for better thinking.
Having an encyclopedia set in our home was a Big Deal. It was something my parents saved for, a major purchase. They bought it from a traveling salesman and when the set was first delivered, it was exciting to open the huge box and pull out the leather bound volumes, so many of them, the pages lined in gold. We weren’t allowed to touch the set with dirty fingers but we were never kept away from the encyclopedia. The volumes were kept on bookshelves easily accessible by little people. In my free time, I nerdily enjoyed flipping through the pages. It was really fun to read the encyclopedia when I didn’t have a specific task ahead of me. I have very fond memories of those encyclopedias which I still have though they are in storage now–not enough room, you know.
What always impressed me about Encyclopedia Brittannica is how it compiled a really wide breadth of knowledge for 244 years. It did so without the help of crowdsourcing, the way Wikipedia does. It did so without the benefit of the Internet and instant access to a wide range of information. A lot of work went into maintaining the encyclopedia, for so long, and relatively well. There were, certainly, flaws with the encyclopedia—it promoted the notion that knowledge requires gatekeepers and that knowledge is immutable. Not all of the information was necessarily correct. The encyclopedia had a lot of merits, though. When I wanted to learn about Egypt, I only needed to pull down the correct volume and I could learn something about a different part of the world. I could learn something about any number of topics and that was awesome. These days, I only need to direct my web browser to Wikipedia or Google but learning seemed like more of an adventure when I had to find something in a book.
It was with some sadness and a lot of nostalgia I read that the Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer publish print volumes, focusing instead on their online offerings. This surrender to progress was inevitable. Wikipedia is also a flawed compendium of knowledge but it is unstoppable in its growth and the breadth of knowledge it contains. There’s also a lot more Encyclopedia Britannica can do with their digital offerings in terms of offering dynamic content. It makes more sense for all that knowledge to be easily accessible online than to have a 32-volume set taking up space, probably gathering dust. Change is mostly good.
Nonetheless, this is the end of an era. The older I get, the more I realize many eras are ending–we are saying goodbye to a lot of things we used to be able to have and hold. I’m not sure how I feel about having to say goodbye to all that.
public libraries will have enough room to house millions of homeless people
thought this was going to be about the Nickelodeon show with Kenan and Kel/Amanda Bynes. There was a lot of sadness and nostalgia when that got canned too.
I remember being like 13 in 1993 all lonely in my house. My parents didn’t have any good books because they didn’t read books. I remember there was an set of encyclopedias in a closet. I would take one out and sit with it for hours, reading it, staring at the pictures. I did that so many times, lying on the floor of my bedroom.
Yeah, I only just heard the news. This hit me surprisingly hard. I remember carrying around a volume with me during grade school, flipping through it, always surprised at what I might stumble upon.
End of an era. Damn.
Vulcanized Rubber, Volcanoes, Mount Vesuvius.
My school was too po’ for EB, though I did love paging through Funk & Wagnalls when we had unstructured library time.
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My first real memory of getting excited about EB was when I was maybe six, and I was fascinated w/ Sirhan Sirhan because his first name was his last name too, but nothing in the EB ever told me why they were the same.
you’ve read the entire compendium? surely this is artistic license.
there are roughly 10 million words in the encyclopedia britannica. if you read 1,000 words a day, every day, it would take you 27 years to read the entire compendium. that’s from birth to 27 years old.
If you read 10 millions words a day, every day, it would take you one day to read the entire compendium. That’s from birth to one day old.
What I’d do is read more than 4 minutes a day. Be a lot faster.
I thought it was magical. All the knowledge in the world was in the encyclopedia. There were too many of us to keep the encyclopedia all together. One of my brothers or sister would find E or T somewhere and we’d get excited and fight for it. We’d get in trouble for fighting, but we were still allowed to read. We just had to take turns.
beautiful article. i feel much the same way about national geographic. there was a big collection of those in our house and i used to browse through them searching for brown breasts.
Good thing I read way more and faster than 1,000 words a day.
Onwards
when I was little my mother assigned homework to my siblings and me she had us copy-paint old masters on index cards
Aw. I didn’t know EB was going all-digital until reading this. What a proper goodbye. I was home-schooled from third grade on (except for part-time classes in high school at a private academy and a community college) and my mother used the EB quite a bit. She bought a set expressly for the purpose of making it part of our curriculum. One of the wisest decisions she made.
In the fifth grade, when my house was threatened by fire, and my dad told me to start loading up the car, I grabbed a couple volumes of World Book. Can’t remember which letters.
That’s pretty skeptical, nathan!
My Britannica (14th ed.) contains 23 volumes (not counting the “Atlas and Index”). Each contains about 1000 pages, including illustrations but not plates, so it has about 23,000 pages.
At one page per day, it’d take about 63 years to read the whole thing – counting inspection of full-page illustrations as ‘reading one page’. But most literate people could comfortably read, let’s say, three pages a day, which would take just 21 years. That is, three pages every day for twenty-one years, plus (if it were one’s first 21 years) school, chores, homework, play, sleep, and occasional assignments on one’s Britannica reading.
What does “comfortably” mean here? Well, here’s a paragraph from the FLOWER article (p. 414, vol. 9):
In print, this paragraph occupies 15 lines of a column of 72; there are two columns on each page. So this paragraph takes up a little less than one ninth of a page; in three pages, one would take in a little less than thirty times the information in this paragraph.
I think this paragraph is elegantly and even prettily written. (In my experience of my encyclopedia, it’s of about average difficulty, but there’s a lot of things I don’t know.) What’s the big deal about someone reading 28 times this much every day for 21 years?
of course you can.
i did notice that you said however: 1. you were to read and write a small report. i can infer that this would mean a little bit of a closer reading than harry potter. 2. you also state that you had to wash your hands before reading them, which of course could be artistic license, but would imply that it wasn’t something you picked up and read on the toilet. 3. at times you didn’t understand why you were forced to read the stupid thing, which also implies that it wasn’t something you picked up for the fun of it.
it makes no difference whether you read the entirety of the encyclopedia britannica, as it doesn’t add or detract from the (rather sparse) piece. it’s just an interesting claim to make.
can i suggest to you a book called the know it all: one man’s humble quest to become the smartest man in the world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Know-It-All:_One_Man's_Humble_Quest_to_Become_the_Smartest_Person_in_the_World
of course you can.
i did notice that you said however: 1. you were to read and write a small report. i can infer that this would mean a little bit of a closer reading than harry potter. 2. you also state that you had to wash your hands before reading them, which of course could be artistic license, but would imply that it wasn’t something you picked up and read on the toilet. 3. at times you didn’t understand why you were forced to read the stupid thing, which also implies that it wasn’t something you picked up for the fun of it.
it makes no difference whether you read the entirety of the encyclopedia britannica, as it doesn’t add or detract from the (rather sparse) piece. it’s just an interesting claim to make.
can i suggest to you a book called the know it all: one man’s humble quest to become the smartest man in the world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Know-It-All:_One_Man's_Humble_Quest_to_Become_the_Smartest_Person_in_the_World
You’re being a pedant.
You must know a lot of stuff. I’d like to quiz you sometime. There would be fantale prizes.
You should have expected that a passive aggressive, sort of strange comment that missed the point of the post completely would receive the answer it deserves.
gotta love those ripe pollen-sacs
love those odoriferous secretions
those gay colors
perfect performance of the process
all in all i’d say that’s a whole lotta love
My parents had the full Will and Ariel Durant ‘Story of Civilization’ set (which they eventually gave to me as a gift). Not quite the EB, but I have a lot of fond memories of reading passages from the Durants’ huge work.
it’s a lot of sexual reproduction
I hope it continues, and that colony-collapse disorder and white-nose disease are outliers and not forerunners
the whole form and structure excludes expression of genetic variation not contributory to reproductive success
and perfect – ‘completed’ – is an unwisely teleological word to use of evolutionary advantage
I wonder how useful that paragraph’s use of the word “common” is
are grasses and other wind-collaborative pollinators not “common”
I also note the fallacy of To attract them
Darwin wrestled with the imputation of conscious intention to nature suggested by how we talk about it
natural “selection”
–when it’s not actually a selection, but rather, the success of one variant in an array of varieties
how long do you think it would take a professor to go through the info in this paragraph for an intro to botany class
nice!
having been rightly put in his place by the freudian incision of someone who claims to have read the entirety of the encyclopedia britannica — and moreover believes that it imparts some kind of authority to write five pointless paragraphs about a non-event (and who ends the last paragraph with the word ‘nonetheless’) — the chastised commentator slinks back into the dark recesses of the web. in future he will surely devise a more actively aggressive way to call out a writer who capitalizes random Noun Phrases as if it’s some sort of innovative literary device instead of a band aid for her profound sense of literary self doubt. that same sense of self-doubt that would cause someone to claim to have read the entirety of the encyclopedia britannica.
how’s that for passive Agressive pedantry?
Well-made reference books are things of beauty – there’s art to making them – , and the transition from ‘book’ to, what, ‘file’? what is a literary e-unit comparable to a book, other than an e-book? — is an interesting thing to think about (in many ways) and an emotional spur.
To me, what’s interesting about reference books as discourse is their character as such. What makes a reference material a ‘good’ reference material? Usefulness, beauty, . . . what else? You’d want a dictionary or map to be a) accurate, and b) easy to operate. (Those are what constitute practicality, no?) How do beauty and pleasure relate to practicality, to functionality?
I think the big thing in writing for reference – writing to be turned to quickly and accurately – is the tension between compression and access.
How is writing a poem different from defining a word or drawing a location? is it the magnitude, or the presence itself, of excitation of feeling?
it IS a lot of sexual reproduction – the LOVE is all mine – and there’s a whole lot about plant sexual reproduction (and sexual reproduction in general) TO LOVE – but then, i can get off on mitosis, budding, spores, etc etc ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproduction )
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grasses “common”? – of course they’re “common”, to us: “Plant communities dominated by Poaceae are called grasslands; grasslands are estimated to comprise 20% of the vegetation cover of the Earth.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae )
re: “To attract them” – We don’t like Sugar because it is Sweet, rather Sugar is Sweet (Good, Desirable, Tasty) because we Like it (as a Good Source of the Energy we need) etc etc – the Giraffe’s Neck isn’t Long so it can Reach treetop Food, the Giraffe can Reach treetop Food because its Neck is Long etc etc
so much to discuss here that mimi (B.S. Biology i’ll have you know) isn’t very good at discussing in a comment box, basically i agree with everything you say
intro to botany, sophomore year, I’d say two weeks (six hours) would be good, to a budding (har har) botanist? “oh please let it never end!”
Britannica was fun and so is Wiki. Let’s all go out and learn everything imaginable.
You are the only person besides me who I know [or would admit] that they had read the entire EB cover to cover. I very rarely mention it to people and they either think I’m a lying, a jerk, or jerking their chain. The last time I mentioned it was during a game of Trivil Pursuit, and everyone became slack jawed. Of course, it’s where I found about sex; the rest of it was dessert. No one forced me to read it. It was just cool to have all that information at my finger tips. I recall those years as a brilliant sunrise every morning. I miss it. Nothing lasts forever.
in future, mud sling you!