After 244 Years, Encyclopædia Britannica Stops the Presses
 

Well, now I want one.

I think this sentence is all that needs to be printed to explain the entire situation:

I am proud to have been one among the "fleet of traveling salesmen" selling Encyclopedia.

It inspired me to get my butt to college.

I kind of liked randomly looking up things, then finding something else along the way.

Plus, it peaked with the 1911 edition when it had the perfect blend of comprehensiveness and casual genteel racism.

I do that with Wikipedia all the time. I'm on the site looking up info on something like a solar filament and the next thing I know, I'm reading about The Texas Rollergirls and two hours have disappeared.

As an aside, once I get Headliner off to college, I hope to use Wikitravel to plan trips. Hit the sites "Random page" button and go wherever it takes me. Today's destination would have been: Retezat National Park

Oh, I loved doing that, too!

Really? I don't find the digital version to be as amenable to random finds. I look for something, and find it, and that's that.

Sad to lose such a staple of my childhood.

Try the "Random page" link at wikipedia. You'll learn more soccer and cricket players than you'd ever believe existed.

I hit an NFL player at 31 clicks. Click 33 got me a soccer club. Belgian Pro League at 40. Finally hit a Japanese player at 42.

!

Holy carp: did you know that Wikipedia has a List of airports in Poland with unpaved runways?

And on only my third click!

Kevy: I only knew about that because of film location work that I got to help with a couple months ago.

12 Clicks: Sampsa Timoska, Finnish footballer (and it was the third sports related result).

Wow, are they okay? You didn't send any of them to the hospital, did you? Dang, I better be nice next time I see you, you're one tough dude! :D

Back in 2001 or so I was taking Library Science classes and learning the finer points of old school reference work, using seriously thick tomes to look up simple things like what films Marilyn Monroe was in, then having to switch to different volumes to follow the career of any of her costars, and using entirely different books to look up detail on the films themselves...I was already used to digital card catalog programs and imdb and was rather surprised at how complicated it all was. The second realization is that I was studying a nearly dead science, and that it wouldn't be long before it crumbled away.

It is a shame in many respects, but it's only because of the amazing availability of information, and that's an overwhelmingly positive thing.

1. Science Fiction novel.
2. Indian actress
3. Serbian radio top 100 songs
4. One of three counties in the United States
5. Commune in eastern France
6. A town in India
7. A Boyz II Men song
8. A town in Nova Scotia (possibly)
9. A Dutch Golden Age still life painter (I thought that might be a winner)
10. A Japanese actress
11. Protestants in Tanzania
12. A United States passenger rail network (not amtrack!)
13. A 1999 magnitude 7.1 earthquake
14. A Canadian ice hockey player. (Ooh so close!)
15. A Christian religious awakening
16. Singapore's best known drag queen.
17. The number 868 (disambiguation)
18. A 12th century learned clergyman from Liège
19. A French financier and politician
20. All-time General Managers of the Chicago Blackhawks (Grrrr.. More Hockey)
21. Incidents of political violence in Washington, D.C.
22. Species of frog from Cameroon.

*whew* Time for a lunch break, back in a bit....
OK, I had a nice chicken sub at Quiznos and now we continue....

23. An administrative district of Gmina Kościerzyna
24. A town in the Canadian province of Newfoundland
25. A radio station in Ili'ili, American Samoa (Perhaps they broadcast soccer games...)
26. A 1922 silent film
27. A Centre for Music and Performing Arts
28. An American documentary film director (Again, damn. I thought I had it)
29. A festival in Tamilnadu
30. A village in Spain (I suppose some soccer players might live here)
31. Top Rock'n'Roll Hits: 1959
32. A Canadian doctrine of constitutional interpretation (Trending back towards Ice Hockey)
33. Latin Grammy Awards
34. Studio album by Swedish band Club 8.
35. Giovane Alves da Silva Winner!!!!




I'll bet you clicked on at least one of those links. Which one was it?

Well, sure, if you're only interested in results, but you can't beat the archeological thrill of immersion in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and various microfiches and microfilms.

That's too bad, when I was in library school ('96-'98) we did learn that stuff, to a degree, but mostly it was all about the wonderful new world of data availability ("compare and contrast this weird new thing called "google" with DIALOG" was a paper I had to write).

As I've said, it was becoming a librarian that made me indifferent to the book. I was just interested in how best to store, structure, and retrieve information.

Like you had to ask..... :rolleyes:

My parents still have the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias I used to write my elementary school research papers.

We also got only a cursory lesson in that with one quick research project using the dusty books. They wanted to us to know how they walked uphill in the snow both ways back in the day, and understand the roots for the electronic databases they subscribed to at the time (most of which is being washed away by the free public offerings on the internet today).

My card catalog class was much more intensive. The instructor was an old German librarian who looked like Doc Brown and was absolutely distraught at the loss of the fine art of typing cards. We spent what seemed like an endless amount of time cracking the code of tabbing and spacing and all-caps and parenthesis, only some of which still applied to online cataloging. We used Dewey reference works and created our own subject descriptions even as I was working at a school library and ordering automated processing on all of our book purchases because it was dirt cheap. I know someone has to sit in a cubicle and do the data entry but now that is one person is employed the publisher itself, not even the middle-man school library sales company or any sort of district librarian, never mind the librarians that actually work at the library. Of course special collections and older acquisitions require that kind of know how, but in most scenarios these days the easy-peasy software walks you through it.


My parents still have encyclopedias from my dad's youth, circa 1960. They are good for a fun night of dramatic readings of science entries.

They also have the ones I used for reports, which were bought from a yard sale and are as old as I am. They were still perfectly useful for most (non-science) homework, at least then.

Snort!

Like that's not totally predictable and obvious. :D

I can't raise the level of my workbench with a wiki search, though...

I remember the F&W salesman coming to our house with a heavy case full of books and my parents buying them. Then the volumes arriving and then subsequent updated appendix volumes every year until I got out of high school.

Yup, but I don't think he was in that one.