E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A*

As a child, one of my great pleasures was browsing through the Collier’s Encyclopedia. Our set resided in a bookcase in the living room, and its very existence meant that there was always something to read in the house.  (Not that lack of reading materials was ever a problem.) A big annual event was the arrival of the annual Collier’s Yearbook, which updated the otherwise static set with the skinny on what had changed in the previous year. Thus, if you hadn’t heard already, you’d learn that the Belgian Congo was no longer the Belgian Congo, and that Hawaii was a state.

It is hard to explain in the era of instant info what a tremendous source an encyclopedia was, and how thrilling it was to look through the updates to review the doings of the prior year.

The Collier’s Encyclopedia, which eventually wended its way into Microsoft Encarta, has been out of print for years.

So I was surprised to read that the print version of the rival Encyclopedia Britannica is about to bite the dust.  (Source: LA Times.)

"We just decided that it was better for the brand to focus on what really the future is all about," said Jorge Cauz, Encyclopaedia Britannica's president. "Our database is very large now, much larger than can fit in the printed edition. Our print set version is an abridged version of what we have online."

The Encyclopedia Britannica was far more venerable than the somewhat parvenu Collier’s, which dated form the early 20th century. Britannica was first published in 1768, when it was founded in Scotland. In the midst of the Great Depression – 1935 – it moved to Chicago.

Since we owned the Collier’s, I had always figured that Britannica must be the classier, or at least the more normal, brand of encyclopedia. (We were known as a family for being somewhat off. P.F. Flyers in a world of Keds. Easy Money, not Monopoly. Keyword, not Scrabble. My parents were not easily swayed by popularity.)

Then I saw that Britannica was owned by Sears. So much for the illusion of swank. It must have been the name “Britannica” that conferred superiority on it. In much the same way, when I hear Shakespeare performed in a British accent, I am never able to discern whether the acting’s any good. It just sounds so high-brow. Like the Collier’s – I just looked it up – Britannica was:

Marketed door-to-door for generations, it was a robust business that employed thousands and sold more than 100,000 sets as recently as 1990, its best year ever, when it generated $650 million in revenue.

I don’t know what a set cost in the late 1950’s, when the door-to-door salesman must have rung our bell. But you can still get a set of the final edition of Britannica for $1,395. Which has got to be at least an order of magnitude more than my parents would have paid for a set of encyclopedias, however mighty the brainy appeal of it must have been. Whatever they paid for in stood five kids in pretty good stead for grammar school research. (By high school, you really had to use the library and get yourself familiar with card catalogs and the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature.)

And while we’re on the subject of door-to-door salesmen, the Fuller Brush man gave tiny samples of lilac toilet water, which I still remember the smell of, and which we found hilarious because it was toilet water. Like who would want to dab toilet water behind her ears? But what kind of samples could an encyclopedia vendor have offered? A print out of an article on, say, the Belgian Congo?

"This is probably going to be a collector's item," Cauz said. "This is going to be as rare as the first edition, because the last print run of our last copyright was one of the smallest [at 12,000 sets] print runs.

The company has been struggling for a good long time to compete with online. No longer owned by Sears, it stopped going door-to-door in the mid-1990’s, putting 2,500 contract sales folks out of business.

Today, the company focuses on “instructional materials [for] schools.” When the last of the print sets are gone, the encyclopedia business will be the half-million subscribers who pay $70 a year for access to the full online version. (About one-third of their content is free.)

Their biggest current challenge is Wikipedia, which dominates the search engines.

“We know we have a challenge there," Cauz said. "The challenge is not of preference. The challenge is of distribution and how to please an algorithm that tries to identify quality, but doesn't really quite get it right all the time."

Although Britannica does include user-generated content, unlike Wikipedia’s, theirs gets vetted, helping Britannica position itself as the higher-quality information source.

Poor folks. Since when does quality trump free?

I’m out there googling with the best of them. Some question pops into my mind and I look it up online. Occasionally, I’ll look a word up the old fashioned way, in the dictionary. But even if I had an encyclopedia at my fingertips, I can’t imagine looking anything up in it, even something that isn’t subject to change: distance to the sun, definition of pi, birthplace of Harry Truman. Not that pretty much everything is subject to change: didn’t Pluto used to be a planet? It’s just quicker and easier to go to the google. And if what I find there is wrong, it doesn’t tend to matter. (Leonard Cohen’s birthdate, for instance.)

Still, there’s something to be said for paging through an encyclopedia. Sure, when you’re online, you can drift around every bit as aimlessly as you did thumbing through Volume CO-DI of an encyclopedia. But there’s just something junkier - more ephemeral, less brainy – when you’re scooting around online. (Hey, there’s George Clooney getting arrested. Is his aunt Rosemary Clooney still dead? Didn’t her son marry Debby Boone? Is Rosie O’Donnell a Rosemary or a Rose?)

No, it doesn’t make me want to run out and buy a set of encyclopedias. But it does make me want to look up a word in a physical dictionary, if only so I can get lost in a column or two of words. Somehow it seems less time-wasting, more intellectually justified than browsing the ‘net. (Did Alec Baldwin tweet about George Clooney?)

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*How about a shout-out to Jiminy Cricket, who taught us all how to spell the word. (Forget that snooty encyclopaedia. I’m with Jiminy on this one.)