>Later, I introduced the encyclopedia to my kids. They had never used a print encyclopedia, and they looked at me like I was an alien, almost as if I were speaking a different language (such a trite expression, but man, is it accurate). I had hoped they could use the encyclopedia as an old-fashioned reference, but so far, they have completely and utterly rejected it, not even expressing interest or opening it once. That aspect of my plans for the encyclopedia has been a big failure.
The kids' reaction makes perfect sense to me and I grew up with an encyclopedia set in the house.
My family was poor so we couldn't afford the "nice" encyclopedia sets like Encyclopaedia Britannica. Instead, my mom bought the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia one-letter-at-a-time from the grocery store. E.g., the grocery store didn't have the entire A-to-Z set at the store. What happened was volume 'A' would be in the aisle near the checkout. You add that one book to your grocery chart. (One book wouldn't blow the whole household budget.) A few weeks later, the volume 'B' would appear. After a few months, you'd eventually end up with entire A to Z set. F&W was the "more affordable" encyclopedia and they brilliantly set up a "installment payment plan" by tapping into mom's weekly shopping habits. Very clever strategy to use supermarkets as the sales channel instead of commissioned door-to-door salesmen. But even that was too much money for us and my mom couldn't afford the entire set in one year. So the volumes she missed had to wait until next year with a new print edition which was a different color. So our encyclopedia set was a Frankenstein set combining different years. A lot of older HN readers will know what I'm talking about.
I used that F&W extensively in school but I don't wish I had another set of books in the house. Today's Wikipedia is much better. It covers thousands of other niche subjects that a limited set like F&W could ever possibly include. And extensive hyperlinks to see how topic-X-leads-to-topic-Y.
The limitations of the old style encyclopedia are immediately obvious when you go to actually use it. Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic. Even then if you're interested in something even mildly obscure it won't be in there at all. Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper, and worst of all they didn't even provide the sourcing information for the articles that they did have (maybe nicer ones did? The ones at my library did not), so as a research tool they were near useless.
I do remember that there was an exception for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which could be used as a source as long as it wasn't the only source. For some reason it was considered more scholarly than other encyclopedias.
> The limitations of the old style encyclopedia are immediately obvious when you go to actually use it. Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic.
This is a feature not a bug: encyclopedia articles are breadth-first introductions to topics. If you are just mildly curious about something you'll probably get what you need. If you want to know more you'll have a view of the "landscape" and so will probably understand a more specialized book better -- and even be better at finding the right specialized book in the library.
I agree. We had a similar non-mainstream encyclopedia set (not F&W) when I was growing up. I was a voracious reader and, at some point, read them all back to back.
That did not provide me with in-depth knowledge about anything, but even today I have a wide general knowledge, and I am interested in many subjects, some very obscure, which I credit to that encyclopedia.
More importantly, the encyclopedia gave me an overview of human knowledge and helped me to figure out what I was most interested in. The articles about radio, radar, computers and such always fascinated me and, I think, steered me into a career in engineering.
I wonder if that’s wikipedias intent with their simple initiative. You can pull up articles by adding simple in the domain to get a less comprehensive article.
> Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper
Much the same as wikipedia and similar.
But, like wikipedia, they were sometimes useful starting points with those short articles hopefully giving you a keyword or two, or a reference to other articles in the encyclopedia itself, so you had something useful to search the rest of the library (by hand or by asking the original intelligent search algorithm: a friendly librarian!) for fuller texts about.
Also as a child I remember just randomly skipping to a page and finding some interesting fact, then following the references to elsewhere. I could spend hours learning random things I'd never actually need to know that way!
> Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic.
Same as the Web. My experience has been that more often than not I hit "buy/pirate a book" surprisingly quickly when I start to dig past what's on Wikipedia, which is often not that much. Usually something from a university press.
Not only does Wikipedia have the same problem, they actively enforce it. If you try to add more detail, Wikipedia will reject your material on the grounds that they don't want it.
Not just Wikipedia—often, the rest of the Web doesn't have much more than Wikipedia does (sometimes less, when Wikipedia sources heavily from books), unless you count ebooks. And sometimes the book you need is print-only, even if it's fairly recent.
That's not how you use them. (at least not in my family). It was a read the whole thing deal. So much random knowledge.
We had the WorldBooks, but ran across Encyclopedia Britannica in the school libraries. The Macropaedia was _far_ more in depth than the Micropeadia, or WorldBook at its best.
> It was a read the whole thing deal. So much random knowledge.
Me too. And it taught me a skill that I think was the key to my professional success: learning how apparently unrelated things can give you the key to solving problems or understanding things that are important to you.
As a kid, encyclopedias are great sources of broad information. You probably don't need to go any deeper than they do.
As an adult, encyclopedias are a great starting point, but cannot do anything more than scratch the surface of any subject they cover.
That's just the way it is, I think.
The key advantage that printed encyclopedias have over Wikipedia is that the experts writing the articles are chosen by editors and have to be able to demonstrate broad and authoritative knowledge of the subject, before they're allowed to put those words on paper. Not so with Wikipedia.
I think the idea behind them was you'd read them and when coming across a topic of interest you'd hit up the card catalogue at the library to find books that go deeper into the topic.
This used to be false! I have my dad's copy of the ~1910 encyclopedia Britannica and they were still trying to cover the entirety of the field of mathematics in those years!
My college professors said that an encyclopedia article can't be cited because it's a tertiary source of information. That's considered too far abstracted from the original source of the info to be used as a citation. Primary sources are original documents like the U.S. Constitution; secondary sources are books about the U.S. Constitution that offer some kind of analysis by professionals; tertiary sources are aggregate articles citing multiple analyses, aggregating them together like a Reader's Digest but not contributing further to the discussion like a viewpoint or stance or new info.
All of the above is explained in this article[1] (I just lazily searched for one).
Conversely, Wikipedia policies ask article editors to use only secondary and tertiary sources when writing the encyclopedia (related to the "no original research" policy).
I've got fond memories of my Funk & Wagnalls Science encyclopedia. It was "my" encyclopedia - it wasn't useful for all school projects, but it was great to just read. As opposed to the school library's encyclopedia that was better for more direct queries, but filled with topics I didn't care enough about to read through linearly.
I never associated it with being the budget option, but I don't think my set was comprised of different editions either. Also I think my parents could have afforded a Britannica if they had been turned on to the idea, but they were drawn to buying things incrementally from immediate sales channels. You're spot on about the marketing. I remember them always being prominently at the front of the store. From what I remember the first book was $1 or free with a grocery purchase or something like that, and then of course after reading through that I bugged my Mom to get the next one.
(Also I can't help but notice Macaulay's "How Things Work" on the bookshelf in the article. Another hands-down classic that I would definitely push towards kids today even if they don't take to encyclopedias. I believe he's written a follow up book for modern tech, too)
Macaulay taught Illustration at my college when that book was published. Before that book he made one’s on single topic buildings like cathedral and castle.
“Funk & Wagnalls volumes were typically sold in supermarkets as part of a “book-a-week” program. When Mr. Moser came up with the idea of reducing the normal charge to just pennies for the first volume…
The entire 27-volume Funk & Wagnalls set — along with the free two-volume dictionary, another sweetener dreamed up by Mr. Moser — cost a little more than $100.”
When I was growing up, I was fortunate that we did have an Encyclopedia in the house. My grandfather was a regional sales manager for Fields Enterprises, and sold World Book Encyclopedias. So, we had a full set.
It had all sorts of wonderful things inside, and I remember countless times asking my parents questions after questions and they'd get exasperated with me and tell me to go look it up myself. Six hours later, I would have missed dinner and it would be way past my bed time -- and I would have no concept of how much time had passed.
By sixth grade, I was reading at the college level, and my school had no idea what to do with me.
By the time I got to college and had a job shelving books in the main library on campus, I found out about Encyclopedia Britannica, which was clearly at least twice as big as World Book, and I found out also much more authoritative.
I owe my entire career, and pretty much everything I am to the encyclopedias we had when I was a kid, and my grandfather who made sure we had a set.
Funk & Wagnalls also had an English dictionary in the early 1970s with excellent etymologies, which seem absent from dictionaries when i've looked in a Barnes and Noble store.
I don't know what Barnes & Noble carries in stores or what dictionaries are printed now. Paper dictionaries have limited space for obvious reasons. The paper dictionary that ignored those restrictions, the Oxford English Dictionary OED, was 20+ volumes.
Now most dictionaries are online like encylopedias, again for obvious reasons, and the leading ones at least have etymologies:
The OED is the definitive historical dictionary of English, including its etymologies. Unfortunately it's not free, but you might be a member of an institution that subscribes.
The leading American dictionaries are Merriam-Webster, which has a free edition and a subscription-based unabridged edition (Merriam-Webster now is owned by Britannica, which was American last I knew), and American Heritage, which is free and which has a section on Indo-European and Semitic roots of words.
I had different encyclopedias at home, most of them targeted to kids. There were two which had specific subjects. One, science and the other, the human body. I believe they would have been more helpful than the internet – I did not have the internet, or even a computer at home at the time – because of the tactile experience. On a computer, everything blends together, and you have to do a more conscious effort to recall a particular fact. Later, I had access to Encarta but, I still preferred reading the physical books.
This has shaped my current learning process. I liked to explore a subject instead of getting a direct answer right away. Even when I'm googling, I click on a couple of results first before I'm satisfied. I'm not comfortable with ChatGPT for the same reason.
This takes me back. We had most of a set when I was a kid. I remember many times reading science articles over and over while eating cereal at the kitchen table. I guess not a lot has changed except I read wikipedia (or, let’s be honest, HN) instead.
My oldest child is a voracious reader, but she mostly reads fiction/fantasy. I got her a Neil deGrasse Tyson book that she liked. This article reminds me that I need to provide more of that sort of content.
I read all the scientific articles over-and-over and dipped into the other articles over time. Eventually I think I read much more than half of the full set. Not a bad thing. If we'd had smartphones back then I'm not sure I'd learnt anything useful.
If one talked about illegal download, z library and pdf drive in the past can provide you unlimited academic books. Sadly both gone. I would not have read about quantum field theory … not that I have no access to u library. But you need to surf those books to find one you can “understand” before you dig in. Even buy one as reading read book is so much better.
F&W had a bad reputation (I had a copy as well as a child, for the same reasons, purchased a volume at a time at the grocery store), but it wasn't that bad. Microsoft eventually purchased the rights to it and many of the articles from their 1990s CD-ROM Encyclopedia (Encarta) were either taken directly from F&W or only slightly edited.
That it wasn't a "serious" encyclopedia, probably due to its low cost. Another comment mentioned being allowed to use Encyclopedia Britannica and no other encyclopedia in school because it supposedly was the "most authoritative". It also was the most expensive while F&W was the cheapest (World Book was in between in cost).
Good ol Funk and Wagnalls, we had the same set, bought through the same process...they also had a classical music record collection distributed the same way...volume 1 was Beethoven's 6th, which is one of my favorites to this day...
My mom bought us these, too. But she didn't always go to that supermarket (National, iirc), so we had, say: A-G, K, M-R, and XZY. Or something like that. Still, she was soooo excited when it started that it was infectious.
> The kids' reaction makes perfect sense to me and I grew up with an encyclopedia set in the house.
Same, and same, and I don't know why the author ever expected anything else. You can't give them a hoop&stick and then complain when they'd rather play with, I don't know, I'm old and childless, some modern toy.
I never have, but as a child I received a couple, and they're great fun. In this case my thoughts are twofold. First, it sounds like the kids are old enough to be potential users of the encyclopedia, and more importantly old enough to start choosing their own sources, and the way I remember it that's a bit past the age at which a cardboard box holds much excitement. Second, the article has a picture of the box that the encyclopedia came in, and it doesn't really look all that large to me; I've gotten larger ones than that from amazon plenty of times and I would expect the author has as well.
What was the time period for this. Don't remember this at law. I got 14 year old handme down world books from my cousin and the giant Random House Encyclopedia in the 1970s. Growing up there was nothing but time and the ability to read.
The kids' reaction makes perfect sense to me and I grew up with an encyclopedia set in the house.
My family was poor so we couldn't afford the "nice" encyclopedia sets like Encyclopaedia Britannica. Instead, my mom bought the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia one-letter-at-a-time from the grocery store. E.g., the grocery store didn't have the entire A-to-Z set at the store. What happened was volume 'A' would be in the aisle near the checkout. You add that one book to your grocery chart. (One book wouldn't blow the whole household budget.) A few weeks later, the volume 'B' would appear. After a few months, you'd eventually end up with entire A to Z set. F&W was the "more affordable" encyclopedia and they brilliantly set up a "installment payment plan" by tapping into mom's weekly shopping habits. Very clever strategy to use supermarkets as the sales channel instead of commissioned door-to-door salesmen. But even that was too much money for us and my mom couldn't afford the entire set in one year. So the volumes she missed had to wait until next year with a new print edition which was a different color. So our encyclopedia set was a Frankenstein set combining different years. A lot of older HN readers will know what I'm talking about.
I used that F&W extensively in school but I don't wish I had another set of books in the house. Today's Wikipedia is much better. It covers thousands of other niche subjects that a limited set like F&W could ever possibly include. And extensive hyperlinks to see how topic-X-leads-to-topic-Y.