The Lost Art of Book Learning

Growing up, I had a set of World Book encyclopedias that had been my father’s and his sister’s in their childhood. The section on presidents stopped with Eisenhower. Still, I spent a lot of time browsing through random pages in those books. I can still remember their smell and what the inside cover looked like. I particularly loved the section on the solar system. They may have been woefully outdated, but there was still a lot of knowledge in those 20 or so volumes (some letters had to share a book.) They were purchased by my grandparents, one at a time in the grocery store.

To meet my parents, one would not peg them as people particularly concerned with their child’s education. They seemed much more concerned with drinking, fighting, and hanging out at the local bar. They were minimum wage laborers with high school educations and easy to stereotype as the sort to devalue education, but anyone who thought so would have been wrong.

I was categorized early on as “gifted”, a label I believe is best defined as “a kid with an unusual and precocious interest in school and learning.” I was an early reader, had a good memory and was a knowledge sponge. Far from the foolish hillbillies eschewing fancy book learning, my parents were proud and they did everything they could to help me succeed. For them, that meant Christmas presents that encouraged whatever subject I happened to be interested in at a particular time: a telescope when I wanted to be an astronomer; books about archeology when they found me in the driveway searching the gravel or in the backyard digging holes to look for fossils; a typewriter when I wanted to be a writer. I once came home from school and found my room decorated with dinosaur posters my mom found at the local teacher’s resource store when paleontology was my thing.

The fact that I sat and read an encyclopedia that was 30 years out of date caught their attention, too. Back then, a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica was $1400. That would have been over a month’s pay for my mom and dad, assuming they were both working full time at that point. There were still door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen in those days, but we lived out in the country where no peddlers bothered to go. My parents heard that you could get a set of the books on installment, so they made an appointment with a Britannica salesman.

They didn’t meet at our house, which was less than presentable. The salesman’s visit would be in town at my grandmother’s home. I wasn’t there, but presume there was a sales pitch by a hopeful salesman to my parents, who tried to put forth their most respectable personas. My parents filled out an application to purchase the set on credit and waited to hear back – no instant credit checks in those days.

Their application was denied. Their income was a subsistence, and if they had any credit at all, it was bad. It was no doubt for the best that they were not approved for a $1400 purchase they couldn’t afford. I don’t remember much more about it, and though I probably was a little disappointed, I still had access at school. But now, as a parent, I can’t help thinking about how my mother must have felt.

Here she had this studious little girl with a lot of ambition, bound and determined that she would go to college, and she could not afford to supply her with access to knowledge. Yes, there were plenty of other ways she and my dad were making it harder for me to succeed, but those were less obvious and easier for her to ignore.

Of course, we have the internet now. I’m in a much better financial place than my parents were, but my children have more knowledge at their fingertips now than any set of books could ever hold, for the monthly cost of our internet service. I confess that I am delighted when I find them taking advantage of this access to satisfy their own curiosity. I have “caught” my older son watching YouTube videos about the Vietnam War and the Russian Revolution, and my younger son routinely looks up words he doesn’t know or googles random questions about science or nature.

I think about parents who can’t afford an internet connection in their home, and what a disadvantage that is (though I would guess internet service in the home is more ubiquitous now than an encyclopedia set was in the 80s.) Educational inequality is a real thing, and it is not just about school funding. My lack of current encyclopedia was a very minor hinderance compared to not being able to participate in class remotely during the pandemic. Even though I am still on the fence about full reopening of schools right now, these considerations weigh heavily in favor of doing so. I know that not all kids are equally supported at home, even for those kids whose parents care.

Instead of a beautiful set of hardback reference books, my kids have laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Britannica stopped publishing their encyclopedia sets several years ago; World Book is still in print – a set of their 2020 World Book is $600. For reasons of nostalgia, I wouldn’t mind having a set if it wasn’t ridiculously priced. Google searching is utilitarian, but it is not a substitute for the visceral fun of opening a random volume up to a random page and learning something new.

That set from 1959 is still in my old room at my dad’s house, in good condition except for a few that were gnawed on by a blue tick hound we had. Maybe my dad will let me bring them back to my house sometime so my kids can see how we found stuff out in the olden days.