Kind of sad, no more Encyclopedia Britannicas to be printed.

Encyclopedias... that harkens to a time when book reports were a contact sport... when students got their ass kicked by dewey decimal, and teahcers came in to bayonet the wounded... The fortunate ones were spared the humility of dying before the masses, while the unlucky spilled their efforts aloud one at a time to a class of mind numbed brothers and sisters of arms...

Yes, those were the days... the days of our innocence...

 

We had these giant black tomes called Collier encyclopedias when I was a kid. Not very many pictures. Then my folks bought World Book and the yearly annual that came with it. They still have both sets. I sold EB for about 6 months door-to-door when I was between jobs once. Opening the boxes became a ritual with each family who purchased. And the new book smell was always the first thing that most folks commented about.

 

When I was a kid I never really got any exposure to Encyclopedia Brittanica. My school and local library always had World Book, and my grandma bought my sister and I a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias. The thing I remember most about those F&W books is that they had the worst smell, unlike the smell of any other printed material.

 

Aptly named?