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.

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.

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.

my friend was a (bad) encyclopedia britannica salesman.

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

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

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.

But hanging out at the library after school was epic.

So yes, very old.