Printed encyclopedias have gone the way of the typewriter.
For the first time since Colin MacFarquhar and Andrew Bell printed the inaugural edition in Edinburg, Scotland, in 1768, Encyclopaedia Britannica will not publish a printed edition.
Yes, you can still get the encyclopedia online, on DVD or CD-ROM, but Britannica, the maker of the oldest English language encyclopedia, will no longer print all those books.
So, yet another fixture of my childhood has migrated to the digital domain, from which it will never return.
The Kerchevals, like many households in America, had a set of encyclopedias back in the day. They were Colliers New Encyclopedia with Bibliography and Index. Black-bound with red trim. The publisher assuredly presented them as “a scholarly, systematic, continuously revised summary of the knowledge that is most significant to mankind.”
Pretty impressive, and I was suitably awed when the books arrived at our home on the farm at Summit Point in 1962. I took it that these 24 volumes contained, as Collier promised, all that there was to know.
They were a gift for my older brother to help with his school work. Still, we all shared them. It felt as though our modest family on that dairy farm had somehow moved up in the world, having all that knowledge at our fingertips.
The encyclopedias were often useful. This was before computers and the Internet, before cable and 24-hour news. Information just wasn’t as easy to come by in those days… unless you had a set of encyclopedias.
Whenever a question came up that no one in the house could answer, or my brother or I were working on a school project, someone would say, “Go get the encyclopedia and look it up.”
I can still see my mother with one of the great volume’s on her lap, flipping through the pages, proclaiming triumphantly when she found the answer, and then reading it aloud.
Yes, the encyclopedias were valuable for school reports, when used properly. More than once my teacher wrote on the report, “Don’t copy from the encyclopedia!” I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but putting summaries of the known world’s knowledge into your own words isn’t easy when you’re still in grade school.
The encyclopedia always had the answers… objective and unassailable. The Truth. No one in our family dared to say—perhaps they never thought to say—“I don’t believe that.” After all, it was in the encyclopedia.
Today, powerful Internet search engines provide instant access to myriad sources of information from around the world. Google has become a verb and, in fact, I “Googled” the word “encyclopedia” for a quick history.
So, are encyclopedias relics? Sascha Segan, writing in pcmag.com, says they still have their place.
“What Britannica brings to the table is an attempt to provide an objective, transparent source of information, written by people verified to know what they are talking about, in forms students find easy to use,” Segan said.
Encyclopedias still have credibility, especially at a time when the point of an argument can be easily dismissed by a critic who counters dismissively, “Where did you read that, on the Internet?”
We still have our old Collier’s encyclopedias. They remain neatly stacked in a bookcase in the den at my mother’s house in Charles Town.
“I haven’t got the heart to get rid of them,” my mother told me.
It’s a good thing. Along with “the knowledge that is most significant to mankind,” those encyclopedias also contain a lot of memories.