What a Wonderful World

The incredible gift of a set of encyclopedias

The greatest gift my parents ever gave me (well, they were supposed to be both mine and my sister's, but I don't think she ever even looked inside one) was a set of 1969 World Book Encyclopedias, which also came with another set of books for kids called Childcraft, I think? The one thing I always forget to mention when people ask me for my influences is to say the World Book Encyclopedia. They were also incredibly expensive for two kids in their late twenties working in factories while my dad went to night school while also raising two small kids. It's weird to think Mom and Dad were about twenty-seven when they bought these, and my sister was already ten!¹ This was such an incredible gift, because I was completely fascinated by all the information crammed into the twenty or so books. I was never bored once these books were on the shelves in my bedroom, and when we moved to the suburbs and I had my own room at last, the encyclopedias went into my brand new book shelves that were above my new desk.²

It also finally occurred to me, thinking about this, that this is why I've always been good at Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit, because I used to read encyclopedia volumes from cover to cover. The science and math stuff never really stuck with me, but a lot of other stuff sure did, crammed into my memory banks like a mini digital mental library, and I was always able to rattle off the answer without even thinking about it. It also explains why I have so many varied interests, throughout all of history, why I know how the government is supposed to work; even now I can remember pictures and images from inside the books with absolutely crystal clear recall. It was in the Encyclopedia that I first learned about Henry VIII and his six wives, which was fascinating, and Queen Elizabeth I's golden era, and about Ramses the Great and Eleanor of Aquitaine and so many others. It aided and abetted many of my varied interests--history, ancient history, movies and plays and books, dinosaurs, kings and queens and emperors. It was how I learned that every province in both China and India have different languages or dialects (English is the common language in India, or it used to be, anyway), and a lot of basic information on any number of subjects. Greek and Roman mythology, art and sculpture and the Renaissance, the fall of Constantinople, and so much else. I would know basics from the Encyclopedia, and would explore the subjects that interested me in greater length and detail at the library, either at my school or the public branch in our neighborhood in Chicago.

If I wasn’t interested in the book I was reading or was between books and not ready to start reading another, I would just grab one off the shelf and start reading it from cover to cover. Sometimes I just flipped through the pages until I saw something that caught my interest, and then would read that article/entry. By the time I had gotten to high school, I had read them all—including the Childcraft books—and rarely ever used them as references (my freshman year a teacher loftily told me that I couldn’t use the encyclopedia as a reference for research any more and that I needed to use better resources, which stung a bit) anymore, but I still would take one down and read it for pleasure periodically; when I moved out of my parent’s home, obviously, I stopped looking at them because they weren’t in easy reach anymore, and I do miss them from time to time.

Ours are still at my dad's, and are in MUCH better condition than these in this image I found on-line, but yes, these are the editions we had.

Revisiting the joy I used to find in the World Book volumes also unlocked some other doors back in the dusty cobwebbed corners of my brain. We got this set the summer before I started the fourth grade, and the fourth grade was when the course of my life was really set. My sister was two years older than me, and we were very close as children; I suspect my parents always admonished her to watch over me and she always took that admonishment very seriously (I was very coddled and protected and spoiled as a child) so she was my primary source of everything when I was a kid. I don’t remember what it was like when she started school and I wasn’t old enough yet to go—I would imagine that was traumatic for me, but I don’t remember it at all—but I do remember she would come home and teach me what she’d learned.

When I started school, I already knew everything we were being taught. My share of my sister’s educational process ended when I started school, but by then my teachers thought I was a genius, an intellectual prodigy, more advanced than the other kids in my class. (I do not doubt that I was an intelligent child, but no adult knew I had a leg up on everyone else.) Fourth grade was when we started learning geography and history and reading books for class; I already had my set of encyclopedias to read and I read all the time—and like anything else, the more I read the greater my vocabulary became and I started reading books that were out of my age-range.¹By the eighth grade, I was reading and comprehending at a college level.

And if I had ever read a word, I could spell it. I may not be able to pronounce it (I thought Pharaoh was pronounced fair-oh-ah, which makes no sense when I see it now), but I could spell it and use it in a sentence.

The fourth grade was also when I began my fascination with, among other historical subjects, ancient Egypt. My teacher was kind of a mean old bitch, but Mrs. Sevcik (pronounced sev-chuck) used her summer vacations to travel the world, and she took tons of pictures. She had slides made from her negatives and showed them to us. She also loved ancient Egypt, and had been there several times. I of course would look these things up (she also traveled extensively in Europe) after seeing pictures, and of course I was interested in the pyramids already (the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were featured in one of the Childcraft books), and Tutankhamen, mummies, and stolen treasures truly interested me. (I also think there had been mummies and Egyptian things in some of the Saturday morning cartoons, like Jonny Quest and Scooby Doo, but I don’t remember ever watching the 1930s horror film The Mummy or any of its sequels.

I still have a lot of nostalgia for them—and I would take them out of my parents’ basement, where they currently sit, if I had a place to keep them. Sometimes when I am there, I’ll go down and look at them, maybe take one down and flip it open randomly the way I used to when I was young, and read whatever article is on the page. It’s going to be, at some point, very difficult to get rid of them because of my strong sentimental tie to them (Wikipedia is NOT the same thing), but…they are, after all, just things.

Getting older is apparently about losing your sentimental attachment to objects.

1. I was still reading Nancy Drew and juvenile series when I was ten—which was also when I read Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, and The Exorcist.