New Old Encyclopedias

Everyone has a quirky thing they do that other people might not understand. I collect old encyclopedias, but of course I use words like “vintage” instead of just calling them old.

Last week, Joel Davis of Books Beyond Borders invited me to look at some old encyclopedias that he was planning to send to the recycle bin. He sells used books and supports Project Schoolhouse. Books Beyond Borders’ slogan is “turning old books into new schools”, which is just plain awesome and I plan to buy most of my books there from now on. I got to tour their amazing warehouse filled with books of all kinds. For me, this is what heaven will look like, except there will also be a big squishy chair and a good reading lamp.

In the corner, Joel pointed out a stack of boxes. Inside, I found a treasure trove of old and not-so-old encyclopedias. The internet has made encyclopedias obsolete for a lot of people, unless you want to know what the world was like sometime in the past 200 years. Encyclopedias have been around a long time, and dipping into a volume published in 1880 or 1936 is fascinating to a book lover or history buff.

If you come to my house and comment on the array of old leather books in the corner bookcase, I’ll start by showing you Vol.23 REF to SAI of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica opened to “Russia”, where you’ll read about how the Russian Parliament was elected in the pre-revolution days. Votes were allocated based on how much you paid in taxes, and taxes were charged based on how much land you owned. So only the wealthy voted in 1911. The encyclopedia doesn’t provide any editorial comment on the facts it reports, but the reader may get the impression that this isn’t a great way to run a country. We now know that in 1917, the under-represented peasants and workers revolted and the term “landowner” no longer had any meaning in Russia. When you know how the story turns out, the information in an old encyclopedia entry can be extremely enlightening.

Next, I’ll open up the 1936 entry for Germany, where you’ll read about the new dictator, Adolph Hitler, and the Nazi’s plan to revive Germany’s economy by reserving Germany for true Germans, which includes immigration reform, exportation of non-Aryan residents and extermination of Jews. If that’s not chilling enough, and in the Britannica’s cool objectivity, it IS chilling, I’ll show you the 1941 edition, where the essay on the geography of Germany begins with the words, “Depending on the outcome of the war…”

By the time I’m finished with my guided tour of history as seen through the encyclopedia, nearly every visitor has something they want to look up. It’s fun to watch engineers read about “electricity” in 1911 or techno-geeks try to look up “electronics” in the 1955 edition.

None of my sets are complete or valuable to real collectors. The leather bindings are cracked and many of the fold-out colored maps are torn. I love them anyway.

The downside is that no one ever offers to help me move.