Growing Up With Encyclopedias

In the 1920s, encyclopedias became available to a wide range of people through the publication of affordable sets. By the 1950s and 1960s, volumes such as Funk and Wagnall’s were popular. (On the hit 1960s TV show Laugh-In, a repeated one-liner was “Look that up in your Funk and Wagnall’s.”) Children’s-oriented encyclopedias and family encyclopedias became popular, and were often sold on an installment plan. A door-to-door salesman in the 1920s or 1930s might be selling encyclopedias as easily as he might be selling Fuller brushes or bibles.

These sets became a sign of a certain kind of prestige or upward mobility. They were a way of saying, “I care about my children’s education.” Lower income people felt they could invest in their children’s future and in their own betterment by buying such sets.

Many is the child, growing up in that era, who did a school paper by looking up data in the family encyclopedia. The Anatomy of Birds, the History of Automobile Manufacturing, the Country of Zaire, or State Flowers: Family encyclopedias were, in the days before the Internet, the primary source of the drivel that has passed for educational output since slightly after the dawn of time.

As a child in the 1960s, I was aware that these volumes could become out of date, that they could be incomplete, that it was hard to figure out where to find obscure information despite the colorful shelf laid out before me. Yet the sense of accessible world knowledge was enticing. I recall my father boasting that his father, as a child, read the encyclopedia. It was a badge of middle-brow intellectualism, and everyone took it very seriously. I imagine for an immigrant child (like my grandfather), it was also a leg up into the world of American education.

Today, knowledge is available readily online, and, more importantly to me as I recall those days, it is readily searchable. You don’t have to be able to guess the right volume in order to expand your own education, and for this reason alone, searching online would be a vast improvement, even without the greater depth of knowledge, breadth of subject, and rapidity of update.

When I moved in 1999, I threw away a must, basementy-smelling Children’s Encyclopedia set I’d had for many years. It was printed prior to the fall of the Soviet Union and was hopelessly out of date, yet it felt like the end of an era.