Aunty Acid by Ged Backland for April 19, 2022

Ah, the memories of spending time at the public library doing extensive research.

Really? What’s the IP address?

Oh, do I ever.

MY “google” was a number of CDs we get every now and then and we called them “Encyclopedias” – Going to the library THEN was OLD stuff shrug

I’ve five sets… The oldest is eight volumes “Newnes Pictorial Knowledge” dated 1951, Associate editor Enid Blyton…

I love just reading them, and comparing what was new and modern then, with today…

I have 2 complete sets on my bookshelves and 2 partial, one of which is well over a hundred years old.

When I was ~7, my parents got a set of 1967/68? World Book Encyclopedias; I remember they bought them from a door-to-door salesman and they’d come in sections, not the whole set at once, and I’d get so excited when another book came! I used to read them for FUN! It was like learning a little bit about a lot of stuff (which I still love to do; I call it “dabbling”)

Interesting. A couple hundred pounds of books replaced by a 8 oz handheld piece of plastic. Streaming music is attempting the same fate with vinyl records, but I’m hanging on for my dear ears!

I do! I do!!

I remember we couldn’t afford Britannica or other major encyclopedias, but we had Childcraft books.

Graduation speeches are sure not what they used to be. The valedictorian at the last graduation I attended started off with: “I would like to thank Google, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Write My Term Paper. Without them I would have never gotten this far.”

In the 1950s, my grandmother was enticed by a door-to-door salesman to spend about six months of my grandfather’s income on a set of ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’ that looked quite impressive in their dining room but got used maybe a dozen times. TMI!

Who remembers when new music was released on 45’s???

Frankly I’m glad it’s more compact, and more mobile.

We also had a set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (about 1970’s edition), and just recently it got thrown away into recycling because no second hand store wants them. The only thing I kept was the short version, and the classic literature collections.

Before we threw it out, I looked through each book and noticed how out of date it was, even with science, and not to mention geography, and if it should be kept for posterity. Just to be fair, our kids used it religiously from the time they could read, when writing essays for english, history, social science, science, or geography. That was the first book they checked and then got other books in the library. So I would say that we got our money’s worth out that set.

I suppose, the person who keeps the last set, and brings it to an Antiques Road Show in 2070’s will be the one who will be the winner.

I have a math and science book that does not include E=MC^2

Yet we bluffed our way through school anyway. It was the odd stuff you came across as you were looking up your original subject that was often the most interesting.

I got several A’s on assignments using encyclopedias.

i still haven’t lost the habit of getting distracted by the odd stuff goboboyd mentions above…

Encyclopedia Britannica! My bookshelf looked EXACTLY like that! I finally donated them all to a charity just a few years ago… it took a while to find one that would accept them!

I do! Those were the days…

And to think I felt overwhelmed by information THEN! I love having so much information at my fingertips now, but I feel I’m drowning in all my pictures and emails, and newsletters and blogs I want to keep up with— AND I still want to read books and my New Yorker and National Geographic. I need to go on a technology diet. And learn to pick and choose— and CULL.

There are encyclopedias in public libraries. So, there’s that and Google.

I’ve got a ‘complete set’ of three volumes titled “All the world’s Knowledge” from the 19th century. While in English, it seems to be a very different English. More elegant.

I used to Own the Britannica version of Google.