Fare thee well, Britannica - News - AP
I was sad to read last week that Encyclopedia Britannica is going digital and no longer will be printed. The weighty leather bound volumes adorned the bookcases of encyclopedia snobs who thought of World Book as something of a country cousin. It should come as no surprise, then, that I grew up with World Book Encyclopedia. Not only did we own a set but also my Dad sold them, door to door, because that's what teachers did during the summer months back in the day.
The commission wasn't much but salesmen did get a free set of encyclopedias and my Dad even built a bookcase just big enough to hold the cream-colored leatherette volumes with green and gold trim. I would spend hours reading World Book, absolutely blown away by the H volume whose human body entry contained transparent pages that allowed you to overlay heart and spleen and so forth until the last page was a complete Technicolor picture of human insides.
Or, as Encyclopedia Britannica might call them, innards, if you will.
I always pictured the Britannica being the encyclopedia of the privileged. If it could swirl brandy in a snifter, wear an ascot and talk about foreign films, well, it would.
Britannica was foie gras and World Book was jerky. (Carrying the meat metaphor further, Funk & Wagnalls, then, was potted meat, I suppose.) World Book used a lot fewer words than Britannica to describe popular fifth-grade term paper topics like Ecuador or Pellagra. If the teacher asked us to walk on the wild side and use the Britannica (available in the school library and, I think, the town doctor's house), we would groan. Encyclopedia Britannica reminded me of that person who you ask what time is it and they tell you how to build a watch.
In the days before reality TV, the Britannica was as close as we ever got to TMI. I only needed to know about the favorite foods of the Ecuadoreans. I didn't need to know about the average temperature of waters surrounding the Galapagos islands. Jeez.
For many years, I would regress into insecure country mouse mode whenever I was invited to someone's home and I saw those big, brown Britannicas on display. These people probably had an in-ground pool, not to mention a sound knowledge of Ecuadorean currency.
According to USA Today, when Encyclopedia Britannica was first published in 1768, it caused quite a stir. King George III, upset by the pictures of fetuses and female pelvises in a section on midwifery, demanded that they be torn out of all the volumes.
Crazy ol' fool. You'd think that anybody who had 15 children wouldn't be such a priss pot over a few pictures of genitalia.
A spokesman for the company said that there are no plans for the digital Britannica to be made available for free. Of course not. That would be, well, tacky.
(Celia Rivenbark is the author of the New York Times best-seller, "You Dont Sweat Much for a Fat Girl." Visit www.celiarivenbark.com.)
2012, Celia Rivenbark
