Ad Courtesy of Private Collection of Bradley Keen
Sixty years ago, before the days of Google and Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica was the utmost authority on all things from Aardvarks to Zebras. It was also during this time Encyclopedia Britannica was not only advertised in newspapers, but was also frequently the subject of a salesman’s knock at the door.
Unfortunately, book-bound reference is now a thing of the past, and Encyclopedia Britannica stopped publishing hardbound copies in 2010, when the page count had grown to over 32,000 and included 32 volumes.
i learned a lot from this fine encyclopedia known worldwide…have a set from 1973…have seen the 1912 set before and accessed in on the internet via wikipedia.
When I was a child my family aspired to the Britannica but, alas, made do with the World Book Encyclopedia.
We had World Book too, probably better for the age I was way back then anyway. I used to browse through them all the time.
I, too, had World Book Encyclopedias. They were fun to page through when I was a young, curious one. Unrelated, a book I read when I was nine featured a character who loved books. Her favorite book was actually an encyclopedia, “Encyclopedia A.” It took her an entire year to read that first volume. … can you imagine trying to read all 32,000 pages of these encyclopedias?