The mighty encyclopedia: doing research in grade school in the 1950s
The blue volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia stood tall on the shelves of my brother’s room, the only reference books our house had except for a dictionary and a thesaurus. But the World Book was king, an essential tool for homework when I was in grade school.
Need to do a report on Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper – whatever that was? Turn to the “M” encyclopedia, and copy the text. Or, actually, don’t quite copy it – that’s cheating. How did we get around it? Change the wording a bit and hope for the best.
We didn’t have computers with the world at our fingertips. Going to the library was a long journey, even if moms drove us. And then there was the card catalogue and books that existed on the index cards but weren’t on the shelves. And who knew how to find what you were looking for, even if the books were there?
We also looked things up in the big fat heavy Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. That was a bit better, and often led to a magazine article or two. But the library might not even carry those magazines.
And in the winter we walked ten miles in the snow, barefoot.
Speaking of Cyrus McCormick, I went to Wikipedia – today’s World Book to the tenth power – and found this:
McCormick has been simplistically credited as the single inventor of the mechanical reaper.
Oopsies! Yes, the World Book was probably way simplistic. Wikipedia adds:
He was, however, one of several designing engineers who produced successful models in the 1830s. His efforts built on more than two decades of work by his father Robert McCormick Jr., with the aid of Jo Anderson, an enslaved African-American man held by the family. He also successfully developed a modern company, with manufacturing, marketing, and a sales force to market his products.
There’s a ton more at the link. What an interesting life, including this:
McCormick had always been a devout Presbyterian, as well as advocate of Christian unity. He also valued and demonstrated in his life the Calvinist traits of self-denial, sobriety, thriftiness, efficiency, and morality. He believed feeding the world, made easier by the reaper, was part of his religious mission in life.
And using Wikipedia once again, I am surprised – very surprised – to learn that the World Book is still published. Yes, folks:
World Book was first published in 1917. Since 1925, a new edition of the encyclopedia has been published annually. Although published online in digital form for a number of years, World Book is currently the only American encyclopedia which also still provides a print edition. The encyclopedia is designed to cover major areas of knowledge uniformly, but it shows particular strength in scientific, technical, historical and medical subjects.
World Book, Inc. is based in Chicago, Illinois. According to the company, the latest edition, World Book Encyclopedia 2024, contains more than 14,000 pages distributed along 22 volumes and also contains over 25,000 photographs.
And for a mere $839.00, it can be yours from Amazon.
I bought a leather bound set of Encyclopedia Brittanica soon after getting married, which my kids used a little. (Still sold by traveling salesmen). I wish I had bought the World Book set for my kids.
I did receive a 19 volume set of “Annals of America”– which contains contemporaneous letters, articles, documents from the period of 1600 to the 1970s. I’ve probably used this more than the the encyclopedia. It’s a real glimpse into the past.
Thank you for this post, Neo. Our family had a set in the sixties, although the covers were burgundy. They were fascinating reading. I also recall the paper-based research at the public library. Of course, info is now updated on the fly, so the World Books are out of date as soon as they are printed.
When I was in 5th or 6th grade and my sister in high school I remember my mother purchasing the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica for a fairly ungodly sum. It may have been something like $1800 or $2000 payed off over a year or two? I don’t know. This would’ve been like 1985 or 1986 maybe.
But I do know that set got a lot of good use from us for many years.
My dad had the 1974 World Book and by 1980 I’d read all of it. When my son got to be about 6, I got a 1980s edition of World Book for about $60, which is pretty adequate for everything up until then.
World Book is a bit like Walter Cronkite: the basic information is probably about right, the narrative is harmonious with the majoritarian liberal consensus circa 1960, which is grounds for cancellation today, of course. If you need to get a kid up to speed with the basics of what happened when in Western Civilization you could do a lot worse than older editions of World Book. I don’t know how much more PC it got between now and then.
We had a Britannica, and I used the Reader’s Guide to Periodic Literature. At least there weren’t people in these publications making hourly political updates.
We always got the New York Times Almanac, which had a lot of small tidbits of information, and highlights of the preceding year.
In researching for papers in high school we were WARNED to NOT COPY FROM THE ENCYCLOPEDIA. Or even paraphrase. We also had to include an slightly annotated bibliography. And our index cards. Because we all used index cards to write papers in the days before computers.
When I was in grad school, it was becoming apparent that undergrads were buying papers. It was pre-online plagiarism checking sites, so….
We required them to photocopy (or scan) and submit their source material, with whatever they used in their paper highlighted. We also required an annotated bibliography. Not just MLA annotating, but also, comments on where they got the source material from (and if from the library, the call number), how useful they found it as source material for their paper, including a short review.
So, thanks to cheaters, a ten-page undergrad paper became a big-a** package to wade through. But for the students, it is really just turning in their research to do to write their paper.
You had more integrity than I. As I recall, I copied word-for-word, and didn’t even bother to change the wording.
In my defense, my grade school teachers, to the best of my recollection, never said a word about plagiarism, integrity, etc. Just turn the damn thing in.
In 8th grade we had to do a semester-long report on the solar system. I was working on it when we got news of Kennedy’s assassination. Maybe I had started to change the wording. Maybe.
In 9th grade, the first 6-week topic was the writing of a term paper. While it went in one of my ears and out the other, it was a very detailed, step-by-step process. Note cards, etc. Later that year I did a term paper on Soviet agriculture for a Politics class, and didn’t use the term paper outline from English class at all. It was a good outline, but I just wasn’t ready for it. A classmate of mine who graduated from Wesleyan told me that she used our 9th grade outline for term paper writing through her college years.
My sister took an AP Humanities course her senior year in high school. Neither she nor her boyfriend did well the first semester, as they were more interested in having fun with each other. She buckled down her second semester. She worked very hard on a term paper on Zoroastrianism. She overheard her Humanities teachers wondering about her paper. She ended up with a C. Apparently her teacher, without bothering to rigorously check her paper, decided she had plagiarized it. My sister told me she didn’t plagiarize.
Oh well. My sister decided that she didn’t want to spend her life writing term papers, and became an engineer. Just like her brother. (But engineering students write 15 page lab reports every week, which are as detailed as term papers. All professionals need to be able to write.)
We had a number of encyclopedias at home. I used Compton’s a lot. We had a set without any pictures- am not sure about the name. I found that encyclopedia intimidating, and never used it.
Book of Knowledge, yes.
Some family friends who retired and retired to Arizona gave us a set of encyclopedias from the 1920s or 1930s. Decades later I asked one of their children if she wanted it back. No thanks, was the rely.
Some studious kids read an encyclopedia set cover-to-cover, volume-to-volume. While I was studious, I never tried to do that.
As a child i read websters unabridged dictoinary, a complete set of funkin wagnalls we got for coupons one book at a time at A&P (the old atlantic and pacific tea company)… and finally read a complete set of Britannica. The prison notebooks or gramsci, the 9 volumes of stalin, the complete works of william shakespeare including sonnets, about half the congressional record where i found out about eliza pinkstone being mutilated by democrats during hayes tilden, then confirmed it in the times paper… they sliced her husbands throat, then the knights of the white camelia drowned her baby… all so they would not vote republican. most science fiction… seriously had to give up reading it when they started reprints in other covers… (this included old magazine articles out of print of sci fi stories).. all scientific americans since early last century to about the 90s when they went communist…
anway
a changer article for you (you did get the defenistration of the ballet dancer, yes)
[though she is not a cat lady just says so]
turns out she is typical
supports simething because they are told the end result
enough years have passed and they liked the cucumber better than the pickle that they made that is now all sour as is the dream.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/childless-cat-ladies-for-law-and-order/
I still have the set of World Book Encyclopedias we invested in when our oldest was about to start school in, IIRC, 1990, along with maybe a dozen of the “Year Book” supplements that came out annually (hence the name).
I also have the set of World Books and a bunch of the Year Books from when I was a kid. After my dad passed and mom had to sell the farm, she didn’t have anyplace to keep them so I volunteered to give them a home. That set dates to somewhere around 1965.
I grew up in the country so the only library I really had access to was the school library. There was a public library in the county seat, but it was pretty small and I think I may have visited it twice in my life.
The first time I went to a public library in a major city I was awestruck by the sheer volume and variety of information and entertainment that was available.
Now all that and more is at our fingertips every minute of the day.
We had a set of The Book of Knowledge from the 1950s, courtesy of a family friend. Sample volume with period cover:
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Knowledge-Annual-1954/dp/B002RMZW1G
I loved that cover. Flying wedges! Skyscrapers! Pagodas! Volcanoes! Wonders of the Orient! I didn’t have the discipline to read the whole set cover to cover but I often browsed through it at random, for hours.
I still love reference books. The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture is a favorite:
https://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Southern-Culture-Charles-Reagan/dp/0807818232
We had the World Book growing up, also the Childcraft set of books and the World Book annual yearbooks. Between the yearbooks and my father’s Time magazines I still have a very clear of what happened every year in the 1960s (and great confusion about the timeline of events since in recent decades). We had Britannica too, but that was old and dull and didn’t have glossy pages and colored illustrations. The World Book was a lot of fun. Great visuals.
I don’t know how rigorous my junior high teachers were. I suppose we weren’t supposed to copy out of the encyclopedia, but the outline they gave us for our state and country reports was straight out of the World Book. The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature came along in high school. I don’t miss that. Today’s databases give you more (maybe too much) with less effort.
We had a set of World Book in our home. My aunt was a salesperson for the encyclopedia for many years, ending as a regional sales manager, I believe.
And in the winter we walked ten miles in the snow, barefoot.
I had that same walk. Uphill both ways, right?
We had my Dad’s 1957 version when I was young, and I received the 1976 version as a bar mitzvah gift.
Hubert…we had a Book of Knowledge set, it was one of the best things our parents ever bought us. I still have it.
Anthony Esolen encountered this encyclopedia as it originally was, and compared it with the (relatively) new version that he already had.
https://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2006/06/the_book_of_kno.html
I still have the complete set (19 volumes) of World Book copyright 1957 that my grandmother bought for my father when he was a kid. The covers are a tannish white, not blue. He never used them when he was a kid, but my brothers and I used the heck out of them back in the ’70s.
We didn’t use them so much for school reports just because the school’s library had a more current edition available. What would normally happen is one of us would ask some question at the dinner table and our father would respond, “Go look it up.”
We would say okay, and our father would respond, “No. The encyclopedias are downstairs. Go get the right volume and bring it up and we’ll look it up, now.”
We would spend sometimes up to an hour reading the encyclopedia; not just on the original topic, but we would end up browsing the volume. For questions about global geography, we would cart up our globe and look that over; for national geography we would bring up our copy of Rand McNally’s atlas (much more current than the encyclopedias.)
Of all the things we learned at these after dinner sessions, the three of us never learned to not ask questions at the dinner table.
KRB
Esolen also wrote this interesting little book: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child:
https://books.google.com/books?id=HFI6AwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=ten+ways+to+destroy+the+imagination+of+your+child+esolen&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiQuIikru6JAxXskokEHVutHGsQ6AF6BAgHEAI#v=onepage&q=ten%20ways%20to%20destroy%20the%20imagination%20of%20your%20child%20esolen&f=false
David+Foster: good for you for keeping your set of The Book of Knowledge. I wish we had kept ours. I think Mom passed it along to another family with kids after my siblings and I grew up and went our separate ways.
I hope it survives somewhere. It always gave me a pang to see pristine old classic encyclopedia sets on the giveaway shelf of my university’s library.
Funny coincidence: just a couple of days ago I was consulting the Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia which my parents bought in the 1950s. I think my second-grade teacher sold them–I remember her coming to the house, which was odd, and I think that was the reason. That suggests it was 1954-5. Compton’s was a competitor to World Book, which I think was more popular.
I spent a lot of time with those books. I was the kind of kid who would just sit and read the encyclopedia. Unfortunately I was (am) also quite lazy and if an article, say the one on birds, got into too much detail or complexity I would move on to something else.
When my father died in 2001 and my mother moved to a smaller house, a lot of the household things came to me and my four siblings. I was probably the only one who wanted the encyclopedias. But I was consulting it the other day for an answer to a real question: I had occasion to want to know what the state of knowledge of subatomic structures was when I was a child and teenager. Looking it up in a contemporary encyclopedia was a quick way to get the answer.
We also had a later–maybe 1970 or so–Britannica, which I also inherited, and which got a certain amount of use when our children were young. But we finally got rid of it a few years ago. It wasn’t being used and was taking up too much shelf space. I kept Compton’s out of nostalgia. There’s a volume missing–“C”, I think.
Raise your hand if you can hear Jiminy Cricket singing E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A.
Growing up in the 1960s, we had the World Book set, with elegant cream and dark green covers and gold lettering on the spines. A new “Year in Review” volume arrived every year. The World Book was full of photos and maps and written in a fairly lively fashion for an encyclopedia. I felt sorry for my friends who had the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was much duller and less beautiful to my eyes. I read almost every word of the World Books (I may have skipped some of the driest entries) and when I got to the end, started over and read them again. We also had a companion set called Childcraft, with maybe a dozen volumes of stories, nursery rhymes, poetry, arts and crafts projects, nature info and such. I loved those books dearly and worked my way through most of the arts and crafts projects. I don’t know what became of the World Books, but I still have a volume or two of the Childcraft set around here someplace.
None of my grown children own encylopedias for their children — they’re anachronisms now, of course, what with phones and Google and all that. Anyway, my kids are Millennials and take a fairly minimalist approach to possession ownership. They don’t weigh down their lives with big heavy things like Grandma’s antique china closet or dusty encyclopedias. I can see their point. But when I visit, I notice something interesting. My grandkids, especially the boys, tend to develop obsessive interests in one thing or another that last six months or a year, maybe sea creatures, or mythology, or insects, or flags of the world. Give one of them an encylopedia-type compendium of information on that current obsession and the child will vanish into the volume and read it over and over just as I did — or insist on having it read aloud, if too young to read to themselves — thus accumulating vast stores of unexpected information. They could, I suppose, look up all this information on their tablets or their Chromebooks from school, but I never see them do that. What they love are big, thick, colorful, heavy books.
Recently, for instance, my seven-year-old grandson, whose early interest in flags of the world is now blending into a fascination with geography and maps, accurately explained to me what an “autonomous region” is, named several and showed me where they were on the map. He’d gotten it all from his “Flags of the World” book, which he’s owned since last Christmas and is now tattered and torn from heavy use. I think that kid needs the World Book encyclopedia.
P.S. to David+Foster: thanks for the link to Esolen’s essay on the differences between the old and the new (circa 1968) Book of Knowledge. He nails one of the old encyclopedia’s main charms. Namely, that is wasn’t organized alphabetically, but thematically–and idiosyncratically. It was a glorious jumble. And it was didactic, in the positive sense of that word. That’s what made it such fun to browse. Whoever edited it understood kids.
I also have an Encyclopedia Brittanica from just before WWI. A lot of very interesting & potentially useful information, but the type font is so small it’s a little hard to read.
I loved the Book of Knowledge when I was a kid because of that very lack of organization. Not only was it fun to browse but I learned all sorts of things I would never have thought to look up.
Disliked World Book, perhaps unfairly, because it was the one everybody copied for assigned reports and I got tired of hearing them stumble through reading aloud the sentences they pretended to have written.
Oh it was still true in the 80s. Much of my childhood revolved around World Book. My grandmother had a 1973 set, which I perused constantly. But, by the mid 80s, it was a bit outdated. The biggest and best Christmas present of my entire childhood was a brand new 1986 World Book set. I was unbelievably excited!
Ultimately, my mom traded those in for a 1992 set; which I still loved and relied on, but by then I was a teenager and understood encyclopedias are only a launching pad for research and learning. And, of course, shortly thereafter, this magical thing called the ‘World Wide Web’ appeared.
I am embarrassed to admit that I have my 1967 World Book set plus the Year Books 68-83 and Science Year Books 68-84. I also still have my set of 1965 Audubon Nature Encyclopedia. Pack rat.
I do not remember what we had, just that my Dad bought them from a salesman, maybe 1960. He also got me the Landmark Books, a new one every month?? I read them all.
I use to enjoy reading, but not now. Books that is. I read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in HS, not a reading assignment
We are stuck in Denver for at least 3 weeks, so I brought two “Jeeves & Wooster books, re reading after many yr.
We had both the World Book and a 4-volume condensed Encyclopedia to work from. They both supplied a lot of research material for homework, and dare I mention, paved the way to learning and understanding how the library is used – right down to Dewey Decimal systems, Microfiches, and so on.
I think this was one of the more satisfying aspects of undergraduate college, learning how to explore sources for information, prowling through the stacks to find the books, then pouring over them to extract the information. Far more satisfying in many ways, then web surfing.
But web surfing covers miles instead of inches.
Growing up in the 1960s, we had the World Book set, with elegant cream and dark green covers and gold lettering on the spines.
Mrs+Whatsit:
My family too, in those colors. I didn’t read all the pages, but I read a lot and I can still see some pages in my mind’s eye.
We also had the Golden Book Encyclopedia, which we brought a volume at a time at the supermarket for like $1.99 each. I loved them too. This encyclopedia was pitched to younger kids and had marvelous illustrations. In particular the covers were intricate collages of objects which would be covered in that volume. You can see one cover here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Book_Encyclopedia
Hmm…One can buy the complete set used on Amazon for $255.
self-denial, sobriety, thriftiness, efficiency, and morality.
Now do Isaac Singer 🙂
Jethro Tull invented the seed drill in 1701, an interesting guy devoted to doing agricultural research, maybe the first.
My favorite part of the world book were the illustrations. Wikipedia has nothing like them.
We also had the cream-colored edition, probably from around 1960. I remember looking forward to the annual yearbook. My three memories: Being from the midwest, reading all about tornadoes; an article about computers asserting that for a computer to have all of the computing power of the human brain, it would have to be as large as the Empire State Building; and, from the 1964(?) yearbook, poring over the photos from the Zapruder film.
I’m pretty sure the full set is still at my mother’s house. I doubt anyone has cracked open any volume in the last forty years.
It’s wonderful to learn that World Book is still available in print form. I assume that families are still buying, but I doubt WB is as common today as back in the 1960s.
One thing I loved about the 50s/60s was how aspirational — curse you, Kamala Harris, for ruining a perfectly good word! — Americans were then.
We wanted to know more, experience more, and become better. Whether that was reading encyclopedias or watching Leonard Bernstein explain classical music on TV or learning a musical instrument or seeing serious films and discussing them.
I don’t notice that hunger so much these days.
Mrs Whatsit– You saved me a ton of typing. Change your dating of it from 1960s to the 1950s when my parents went into hock to get the World Book, and the rest follows my growing up with it darn close. My mother still had it when she finally had to sell her house and move to an assisted living place. M brother and I decided it needed to go to a new home and he found one for it. In packing up the house we got stuck looking a various item in the WB and my wife lambasted us for screwing off. My mother was still getting the annual updates, but had given up making the annotations in the articles in the main set that were updated.
I am still that kid who gets stuck in reference books and map books. I have several of those “coffee table” books of maps and geography and historical events that I sit down and browse through, some for revisiting old times and other times to catch up on current events as to their locations.
I will submit that the 6,7,8th grade teachers were not heavy handed on plagiarism because they got a “win” when we looked the material up and wrote it down for submission, thus showing we read it and maybe would remember some of it. The paper was a tool to get the learning done. High school was when people got all “retentive” about format, and footnotes, and bibliography.
And about writing [ref Gringo, above]… Yes! No matter what you do, if you cannot write well enough to convey what and how something is done, or why it is done, you will be laying second fiddle to someone who can. And it needs to be done in English. Those who cannot operate the English language will be left behind.
“I am still that kid who gets stuck in reference books and map books.”
Same here, and that reminds me that we also had the World Book Atlas, that could keep me fascinated for hours. Nowadays I enjoy reading histories and biographies, but invariably get frustrated by the poor quality (or complete lack) of maps, especially where battles and wars are being described.
Then there was the time my sixth grade class picked country names out of a hat, and we had to write a report on that country.
I picked Chad, the country in the center of Africa that looks like the profile of a bishop wearing his hat. I opened my beloved World Book and discovered an entry only one paragraph long and it was short.
What was I going to do now? My usual encyclopedia paraphrase strategy wouldn’t work.
My teacher lent me a New Yorker article on Chad and I was saved.
But I never looked again at the World Book Encyclopedia as the place where all the important information could be found.
huxley, 9:16pm: Yes, you’re right about the culture in the ’50s and ’60s. You’re probably familiar with Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly and the song “I.G.Y.” He really describes the feeling well.
Mac:
I tend to get caught up in the super-smooth precise music of the Steely Dan boys.
Their lyrics are close to modern American poetry, which means I have to work at my listening for the words. My impression is generally the lyrics hang together and say something, but it’s not a free ride.
Anyway, I don’t know the Fagen album, though I can tell I’ve heard IGY. I’ll have to sit down with it.