Farewell, Britannica

I was a bookish kid. One of the highlights of my week, at least during the warm-weather months, came on Saturdays, when I walked more than a mile to the town library in Southbridge, Mass., and checked out as many books as I could manage to carry back home.

So 1960 was a big year for me. That’s when a door-to-door salesman persuaded my parents to buy Collier’s Encyclopedia. The complete set. As I remember it, they bought a bookcase then too, in which they displayed the encyclopedia and the supplements that Collier’s issued every year, to chronicle the previous year’s events. 

I loved pulling out a volume at random and leafing through it, knowing that, even if I wasn't searching for a specific entry, I was sure to stumble upon something interesting.

That experience came to mind the other day when I read that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is discontinuing its 32-volume print edition after 244 years. 

Yes, Britannica is available online. Yes, Wikipedia is wonderful, partly because it contains all sorts of stuff that is not to be found in a traditional encyclopedia (although the entries vary in quality and accuracy). Yes, the world has gone digital, and anyone who laments that fact is sure to be branded a Luddite. 

I love the Internet as much as the next guy. But there is - or was - something to be said for the heft, solidity and beauty of an old-fashioned encyclopedia. In part, it's simple nostalgia, a yearning for the norms and artifacts that helped define our childhood. But there’s more to it than that. 

The serendipity that comes with browsing is not to be found in an online encyclopedia. Sure, I can look up, say, Egypt, online and find links within the text to entries about the Middle East, the Muslim world, and related topics that have some connection to Egypt. But only by flipping through the printed encyclopedia volume containing the entry on Egypt might I stumble upon eels, or Dwight Eisenhower, or Eleanor of Aquitaine, or English literature. 

More’s the pity.