> how old are you?

[wendinoakland@beige.party]

@nixCraft I remember having an encyclopedia as a kid, and not knowing who gave it to us. There were a couple of well connected relatives who might’ve been the source. And dial phones!

[_the_cloud@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft Someone else in the thread mentioned this, but "encyclopedia salesman" used to be a job up through the 1980s. They would go door-to-door through neighborhoods and look for families with kids. Most people couldn't afford the whole set, but you could buy a volume each month for 2 years. My parents did that. I remember using them for school papers, though I was often frustrated by how sparse and short the entries tended to be, a paragraph where I wanted at least a page or two.

[tezoatlipoca@mas.to]

@_the_cloud @nixCraft

We were fortunate to have a full set of World Book. I would be supposed to be researching a project on #Paraguay and wind up reading about Penguins, petunias, pork, plumblines, plums and partisan politics. so long as I didn't have to get a different volume.

I end up doing the same thing using #Wikipedia now. Need to look up something about an obscure thing and suddenly I'm learning about the seven thousand members of King Crimson.

[kbob@chaos.social]

@nixCraft My parents bought a set about the time I was born (1959). It was a 1952 edition; they may not have been the first owners.

I still have them in the basement, along with their wooden bookshelf. Haven't looked anything up in a couple of years. (-:

[amiserabilist@beige.party]

@wendinoakland @nixCraft

my friend was a (bad) encyclopedia britannica salesman.

he tried to sell them to my dad, even he wouldn't buy them.

[cstamp@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft I’m old enough when they became more affordable. I judged babysitting jobs based on which ones they had.

[pseudonym@mastodon.online]

@nixCraft

Ahh, the venerable World Book encyclopedia set.

And if you've ever been fortunate enough to behold the full Oxford English Dictionary set in print, service edition 1989, all 20 volumes, it too was glorious fun to read, like the encyclopedia, for new words.

[deviledeggpress@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft One of my first freelance jobs in the early 2000s was writing articles for a series of (physical) encyclopedias on U.S. history. I've always been meaning to see if any copies still exist in some public school library somewhere.

[the5thcolumnist@mstdn.ca]

@nixCraft

I remember an encyclopedia salesperson trying to sell a set to my parents. The sales line was that it was less than the cost of cigarettes, as if they were going to give up smoking to get me an encyclopedia.

[rantingcanuck@mstdn.ca]

@nixCraft

I was fortunate; my grandparents had bought my father and aunt a set in the 1960's and kept purchasing the yearly update book right up through my childhood in the 1980's. There was a dedicated cabinet in their home for them.