It had to happen eventually.
And what brought on this chain of events? The announcement by Encyclopaedia Britannica that it won't be producing hard copy editions any longer. Not exactly staggering or surprising news, especially given that the most recent paper edition costs some $1400 (and there's still some left, if you're dying for them and have the room on your bookshelf), but a landmark nonetheless.
For me, especially.
I loved encyclopedias so much as a child. I have to say as a child, unfortunately, since the truth is that I haven't used one since school, but they were a pretty big part of my life for a long time so of course the news makes me miss them a bit.
We never had Encyclopaedia Britannica in the house when I was growing up because it was considered pretty expensive even then (and they did, after all, have to be replaced periodically as knowledge progressed), but it was a regular recourse for me in the library as soon as I was old enough to understand most of the big words. At home we had a Collier's set (or, rather, my parents did, since I would have been approximately one year old when they got it and I'm sure that they weren't counting on having a prodigy), and then later on a World Book Encyclopedia. They were geared more to kids, the World Books, and there was a pretty good chance that if you visited our house for any length of time when I was between about... oh, let's say eight and fifteen... that you'd find me at some point sitting cross-legged on the floor with some random volume open on my lap. Sometimes it was because I specifically needed to find out something, but more often it would be because I just wanted to learn something. Anything. And since the World Book was fairly well cross-referenced, learning anything about something would usually lead me to learning something about something else that I hadn't been planning to learn about, and so on and so on and so on.
Yep. I was that much of a nerd even then.
I loved hard copy encyclopedias. I love the pages, the pictures... I even loved the feel of the weight of the things. But will I miss them?
No, of course not.
Like most everyone else these days (and as not-so-subtly hinted at in the photo. See? I said it was editorial) I find it much more convenient and quick to look for things online. I don't think that I would bother with a non-electronic encyclopedia even if I found one for five dollars in a thrift store. It would be too much of a bother to store, even if I might get some nostalgic pleasure out of flipping through the pages. The plain fact is that old-fashioned encyclopedias are just too non-portable for the way we work these days.
Amazingly enough, even in this bookish house I couldn't find an encyclopedia to take a picture of this morning. The old ones are long gone. What you're looking at in the picture is part of the dictionary from the old Collier's edition we had. It was saved, I guess, because it takes a little longer for dictionaries to be out of date (although even that's less and less true now. Doesn't stop me from loving dictionaries, though. Someday we're going to have to talk about my ridiculous dictionary collection. You heard me -- I have a collection of dictionaries. They're on different subjects, naturally, but... oh wait. I'm distracting myself, and that could so easily be another post that I'd best not waste it).
If you click on the photo, it should be obvious why I chose the page that I did. When I decide to be on point, you better believe that you poor people get beat over the head with it.
That sounds painful, actually. I'd better head back to the pointlessness. Less chance of injury.
The pointlessness, by the way, will be vanishing again for a couple of days. I don't think that I'll be near a computer tomorrow, and my Monday looks to be so busy that there won't be a point in even trying pointlessness. The rest of the week should be a little better than last week, though.
Maybe.
No promises, at this point.
Or pointless, as it were.
And now you know why I don't write encyclopedias...
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