Back in the Day… We Used Encyclopedias

Back in the Day… We Looked Things Up in an Encyclopedia

Before the internet, artificial intelligence, and all the software tools that have taken the world by storm, we looked up information in the encyclopedia. Instead of Googling and clicking, we grabbed books and turned pages.

Both the dictionary and the trusty encyclopedia were staples of our lives before technology rendered them obsolete. Several things related to encyclopedias and dictionaries are now pretty much part of the past but are fun to reminisce about.

Door-to-Door Salesmen

Door-to-door salesmen would sell everything from indestructible kitchen utensils to vacuum cleaners. But none were ever so dear to our hearts, or well known, as the encyclopedia salesman.

Back in the day, we didn’t worry too much about letting strangers in our homes. Today, that’s a big no-no. With internet advertising and marketing, as well as an increase of crazy people, door-to-door sales of pretty much anything is now a thing of the past.

It’s probably for the best, as salesmen would often use dubious methods to sell their collections of knowledge. The biggest trick up their sleeves, however, was guilt.

“You mean you’re a parent and you don’t have a set of encyclopedias for your children? They’ll never get into college and will end up working for minimum wage if they don’t have vast amounts of knowledge at their fingertips.”

“You mean you’re a teacher and you don’t have an extra set of encyclopedias for your students? One set your school already has in the classroom is not enough for 25 kids.”

A good salesman would flip through the pages of the encyclopedia while talking, casually stopping on the best pages—those with lots of color illustrations. One of the best places to “causally” stop at were those layered see-through diagrams of the human body. Those pics were amazing.

I have to admit, those oily book peddlers were pretty good at their job. During my childhood, most schools, and even a lot of homes, had at least one set of encyclopedias.

Writing School Papers

When I was in school, a lot of the research we did for essays, term papers, etc., came from encyclopedias. Almost every classroom, elementary through high school, had at least one set of encyclopedias on the shelf.

We didn’t have Wikipedia or the Library of Congress on a screen. We had Britannica, World Book, and Funk & Wagnalls. During silent reading time in elementary school, we would grab encyclopedias and look up everything from famous people to various biological functions.

World Book even made a set specifically for kids and dubbed it Childcraft. This set came out with the books bound in pretty colors. Some of the older teachers who had been around for a while had three or four sets of different encyclopedias because some of the more popular letters like S, T, and M got used a lot. Eight states start with the letter M. Whenever we were doing social studies reports on states, there was a lot of fighting over the M book.

Then there was always the issue of copying directly out of the encyclopedia when completing an essay or term paper. Plagiarism was a problem back in the fourth grade. This meant we were forced to get creative with rewrites and copy-editing in elementary school. We learned the art of copying without copying word-for-word.

Yes, we caught you copying word-for-word from the encyclopedia! Now, go back and do real research (whatever that is).

Sometimes, schools and families would lose certain letters of the encyclopedia volume. Kids would take them home, even when they weren’t supposed to, and then never bring them back. Families would pay a small fortune to get an entire set for their kids, only to have little Johnny leave a few books under the swing set. After a thunderstorm or a stray animal gnawing on the corners, the family was missing a few letters.

Other times, people would be missing letters because they could only afford to buy them one at a time when the local grocery store had a special offer. If the family was going through some financial hardships, the kids would only be able to write about topics that started with certain letters.

Whether it was writing term papers, looking up things you were afraid to ask your parents, or salesmen trying to make a living, encyclopedias were a big part of our lives in the 1970s and 80s. I recently read that the World Book Encyclopedias are the only ones still published today. Just one more thing in our lives that is pretty much a remnant of … back in the day.