When my dad returned from the Korean War, he used the GI Bill to attend university, first studying Geology and then switching to Law. As a “Going to University Present,” my grandparents bought him a complete set of the 1954 Encyclopædia Britannica1. It was a bookshelf-worth of books (in fact, it came with a bookshelf, a giant Atlas of the World, and several “Book of the Year” updates for a few years).
After he left university, he was a bit footloose, carefree, and not at all bogged down with personal possessions. He prided himself on not having more possessions than would fit in his Triumph T3, so those books went back to my grandparents. After my mother died in the late ’60s, my grandparents moved in with us. Those books and that bookshelf came with them and ended up in my room, where they remained until I moved to university in the early ’80s.
Sometime during elementary school, I decided I needed to absorb that knowledge (It’s what Spock would do), so I got myself a bookmark and started from Volume 1, Page 1. Slowly, day by day, I worked through every volume, article, and plate. I can still feel that curiously thin paper between my fingers, the thick, glossy photo plates, and I can still smell those books.
It took years to complete the task. It’s not a gripping read.
The author(s) didn’t manage to weave together a coherent plot and huge swaths didn’t interest me at all. Many subjects that did interest me were boring as hell, I’m sure there was much I read and didn’t absorb, and much of it was horribly out-of-date, but it was knowledge for knowledge’s sake, which was good enough for me (and Spock).
I don’t claim to have an “encyclopedic memory,” but I have a legit leg up on one. Did I do myself a disservice by reading an encyclopedia already at least 20 years out-of-date? I’ll never know.
1I’m not exactly sure what “year” you’d call this set. 1954 is an estimate. The Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published from 1929 to 1973 and had what they called a “continuous revision” policy. This set would have been roughly current when my dad went to university in 1954, and we had several Book of the Years going up to 1957 (IIRC).