Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
I remember when I was a child, by father succumbed to a very persuasive door to door encyclopedia salesman and bought a set on a payment plan. It was bit over twenty volumes with most letters of the alphabet dedicated to one volume, but with some letters doubling or tripling up. I recall X Y and Z being a single volume.
I used to love to randomly select a letter, and just read through the articles. I wonder if that was the beginning of my love for reading.
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I can recall when my parents succumbed to just such a door-to-door salesman and purchased the Encyclopedia Britannica. It was just prior to my oldest sister, their oldest child, starting high school. I also recall the day it arrived. I thought that it was the most impressive set of books I had ever seen. Red [faux] leather binding with gold lettering. That and thinking how amazing that every bit of knowledge known to man was to be found therein. I at the time was still to young to read with entire comprehension, but still loved grabbing one off the shelf and flipping through until I found an entry that interested me. I think that you are correct and X,Y&Z may have been in one volume, or maybe just X&Y were combined. I do recall that at the end, after the last entry for Z, there was a very abbreviated multilingual dictionary; English to __________ where the blank included what one might have expected—French, German, Spanish and Italian—and some that seemed odd—Hebrew and Greek. The set was still there to consult when I had to write my first 'term paper' probably five years later on the subject of Genghis Khan and the Mongolian Empire.
I don't think I'd want a set now. I'm not that nostalgic and personal computers and the Internet killed the need for paper encyclopedias.