Aunty Acid by Ged Backland for June 30, 2022

Still have the complete.

I do! I do!

When I was in Technical school, I was browsing through the library one day and went down the aisle with the encyclopedias, of which there were several, some of which were dedicated to only one category. The biggest encyclopedia BY FAR was the one dedicated solely to RELIGION!

Many an hour I’d spend at the library doing research for term papers.

Have a couple of 1960’s era encycopedia, among other things it states that humans have 47 chromosomes, it was believed at the time, and it describes Hinduism as an animalistic religion.

In the 60’s my parents bought some encyclopedias but they quit when it reached the L/M book.

I remember.

Pepperidge Farms remembers.

I was so bored during the summers as a child that I read our “World Book” encyclopedia set. Twice.

I remember, but I try not to admit it. :D

I remember being about 8 yrs old and reading the World Book encyclopedia – for FUN. I loved learning a little bit about a lot of things

My parents still have the 1960 edition of World Books on their book shelf

I don’t have to dust google.

We had Funk & Wagnall’s (yes, of porch and mayonnaise jar fame) purchased in one letter volumes at a time each week at Jewel grocery store in Chicago.

I remember when Google wasn’t used as a verb.

My grandfather gave himself the equivalent of a college education this way. He was forced to support his family while still in high school, so college was never an option. So when he was able to he bought an encyclopedia set (I think it was “The Book of Knowledge”) and over the course of a few years, read it cover-to-cover. I’ve never heard of anyone else doing this, but my grandfather did, and it gave him enough of an education to be able to intelligently discuss just about any topic you can think of.

Although I never attempted that, I also remember that my parents’ set of Encyclopedia Britannica included a packet of supplementary booklets intended to assist someone with self-education goals. Each one was based on a common (at the time) college degree track and was basically a list of articles throughout the encyclopedia that one could read in order to learn all the basics in the subject.

Finding older reference works can be challenging. I wish I could find a project that digitizes them and puts them online. Definitions of words change and the writing of history changes. It would be interesting to see how older references compare.

But Google doesn’t take up as much space.

Still couldn’t find answers to general questions.

can’t take the encyclopedias with me in my pocket…

I use to own that version of “Google”.

I remeber my Mom doing the green stamps at Tops Grocery Store in Buffalo NY, not the one that the tragedy happened at but there are a lot of Tops in NY and especially in Buffalo, when I was younger and she used them to buy a complete set of Encyclopedia Britaninca for me and my sister, one book at a time so it took her awhile, probably about 2 or 3 years to get all of them. I also remember using them quite a bit for research for school work or if I was bored and finished the books I had taken out from library and it wasn’t the day to go back to get more books, I would open one of the encyclopedias and just pick a page at random and start reading on whatever was on the page I turned to. I don’t know what happened to them, they probably got lost or thrown out in one of our moves between NY and PA before we finally stayed in PA and lived right next to library so we used theirs when we need to do school research or used the ones at school library.

Dad bought the set the year I was born, 1949, I was still using it in high school.