Encyclopedias: Be still my beating heart?

I can still remember how excited I was the day encyclopedias came into my life.

And not just one or two, but a whole set.

I was a kid living in our family home in Arcadia, Yarmouth County, N.S., but we might as well have been living in Las Vegas because when my parents finally bought those books I felt like we had hit the jackpot!

I had other friends who had sets of encyclopedias at their homes and now so did we. We were hip. We were current. Encyclopedias were in and now so were we!

We didn’t have Smartphones or the internet to get excited about back then. No, back in the day it was encyclopedias that got our hearts racing. (For younger people reading this column who have no idea what I am talking about, encyclopedias were a set of books, arranged in alphabetical order, that provided information about people, places, animals, health, science, nature, and all subjects imaginable.)

Encyclopedias opened up our world to the entire world – in some cases forever. In other cases for a month or two (or shorter) depending on what was going on in the world and how quickly the information in these books went out of date.

It wasn’t practical to update your set of encyclopedias each year. As I recall, they were pretty expensive. And storage was an issue too since you had to have bookcases large enough to display them.

Still, when my family finally got our set, it felt like – as the saying goes – we had arrived!

They had gold trim on the binding and also on the edges of each page – oooohhh, gold – and we bought the set all at once, as opposed to pacing out the alphabet in installments.

It was like suddenly living inside of a library. And you could do your homework at home! For a few weeks after the arrival of the encyclopedias I was actually excited to do homework.

But let’s be honest, like everything, the novelty eventually wore off.

Still, gone but not forgotten. As I was writing this column, I Googled the word encyclopedias and I found a list of questions people have been posting online about encyclopedias.

Do they still make encyclopedias?

How many encyclopedias are in a set?

How can I get rid of encyclopedias?

Times have changed. Nowadays when people are seeking information, they – myself included – search for it online. Google is my go-to.

Or we turn to another ‘pedia’ – Wikipedia.

And you certainly don’t hear of many people pursuing the door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson career path anymore.

I’ll just add encyclopedias to things from my past that I don’t really miss anymore.

I now use correcting tape instead of Liquid Paper. Remember how Liquid Paper got dry and crusty and your pen literally made ruts through it when you tried to write over your mistake?

Cassette tapes? Those were fun. It was so frustrating when the cassette tape would get eaten inside the cassette player and you’d pull it out and have to re-wind two feet of crinkly tape with your favourite song on it back inside the cassette case.

Our first VCR in my household came with a remote control. But it was more low-tech than high-tech since the remote was connected to the VCR by an eight-foot cord. On the plus side it was hard to lose the remote control unless you lost the VCR too.

Forget cell phones, we had rotary dial phones. And not only did we dance to music, but we stomped our feet on the floor to get a record to stop skipping on a turntable.

The video games we played didn’t have hundreds of intricate levels. Instead the game just got faster and faster until you died, which was usually just by bumping into something as opposed to anything intensely climatic or interesting.

Yep, those were the days.

You can read about them here, just not in my family’s encyclopedias. To be honest, I don’t even know whatever happened to them.

A note to my parents who are reading this, if we still have our encyclopedias please don’t bring them to my house.

The excitement of their arrival wore off 40 years ago.