Encyclopedias: the world is so full

First the face-lift to the blog: now the work begins.  Time to start adding some links – partly so you can follow my train of thought (we hope), partly because that is What You’re Meant To Do Online.  Which means it’s time to check some encyclopedias.

I know what you’re thinking.  It’s really wikipedia these days.  And it’s true – whether it’s mainstream, or a bit arcane, you will probably find it there.

Plus I prefer not to inflict too many sites with winking adverts on you  – so a lot of the time, for links, it’s wikipedia, if only to avoid the eyestrain, and the irritation.

I had a friend at university who was studying business.  Come her first summer holiday, she was signed up to go abroad (BUNAC, I think), and what did they offer her? Selling encyclopedias door to door.

Now even in the mid 1990s, you could tell that a) the internet was on its way up and b) not so many people were buying full sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Somehow, she did rake in some sales, much to her credit – and I think went back and did the same the following summer.  Maybe her toe in the door technique was well established by that point.

So sets of Books of Knowledge, of one sort or another, are less prized these days.  More likely to see them at car boot sales, and in charity shops.  But if you stop for a moment, and actually open one up, they are well worth the examination.

My mum had a particular kids geography one, which I have hung on to.  I haven’t checked it recently to see how PC or otherwise its depiction of different countries is.

But in terms of catching kids’ attention: it did it.  Even if it was line illustrations at points, you were there: with your camel beside you, awaiting a sandstorm.  It brought other climates, other countries, to life, in a way that was exciting for a fairly untravelled child.

It was this book that helped me learn about gale force and hurricane force warnings.  I can still visualise the drawings and text that accompanied each ‘gale force’ level: from smoke no longer going straight up, to ‘white horses’ at sea, to all-out furies at the top of the scale.

We didn’t have an Encyclopedia Britannica set, so I didn’t sit and idly leaf through it on a Sunday.  But there were a few other encyclopedia-type books.  A double volume science and nature one, with an amazing frog on the front cover that looked more like a spaceship.

Sometimes it is enough to have the spell that they conjure up.  To know that knowledge is there, all available to you, whenever you need it – or that you can spool through and come across unexpected discoveries.

These days, Google it.  Find it on Wikipedia.  It’s quick, it’s easy, and you can link to it.  But we have kept our encyclopedias, our other reference books.  We want to show a younger generation that knowledge is still found in books.  That books are still worth opening, checking.

Yes, those reference books will date in time, just like that 1950s geography one has done.  But they still exert a magic.  They show us what our societies thought was worth remembering – how they framed the world, and how much of that world still remains today.

We may no longer expect knowledge to stand still – as a book suggests it does – but there is still a need to see what aardvarks look like, how a zoetrope works.  And everything in between.  And for this, books will (still) do just fine.

(An aside: the venerable Encyclopedia is doing just fine in cyberspace, as you’ll see from the link above.)

I leave the final world to Robert Louis Stevenson, whom I seem to have cited the most this month:

‘The world is so full of a number of things

I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

There are few happier thoughts on which to end.