Twenty-some volumes with gold-stamped spines
The Britannica on the Living Room Shelf Used to Mean the Family Was Going Somewhere. |
Twenty-some volumes with gold-stamped spines, the Encyclopedia Britannica was furniture with a moral purpose. In plenty of American homes, it was the most serious object in the room. |
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News for the America we remember |
There was a long stretch in American life when ambition came bound in matching covers and parked itself right in the living room. I mean the Encyclopedia Britannica, that grand 24-volume monument to self-improvement, sold door-to-door across the country for decades by men in suits carrying sample volumes in briefcases that looked heavy enough to hold a car battery. You could spot a Britannica set from across the room. The gold-stamped spines. The solemn, satisfying weight when you pulled one from the shelf. The way those books could make even a modest bookcase look like the household had joined the republic of serious persons. |
Mr. Calloway came to our house on a Tuesday evening in the summer of 1962. My father answered the door still holding his supper napkin. The sample volume was open on the kitchen table before the screen door had finished swinging shut. This is how your children get ahead, Mr. Calloway said. This is how bright children stay bright. And he was not entirely wrong. Those books gave a child a way to settle an argument, look up a war, find a map, read about volcanoes or the moons of Jupiter on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Plenty of bookish children read them for no assignment at all… just because the world was in there, and the world looked orderly in print. |
But the pitch had a pressure point, and a skilled salesman knew exactly where it was. Families who could barely afford such a thing signed the papers anyway. There were financing plans, monthly installments, signatures made with a little hesitation. A mother would smooth the tablecloth and study the numbers. A father would clear his throat and ask whether there was a cheaper edition. The salesman had an answer for every objection, because answers were his whole trade. One thing America has always known how to sell is the worry that your children might miss their chance. |
In the 1990s, the internet came along and did what no skeptical householder ever managed. It killed the old encyclopedia business dead. Why commit a shelf and a monthly payment to 24 handsome volumes when a glowing screen could cough up the answer in seconds? Convenience won. The books lost. That is usually how these fights end. And I will confess I feel a pang for what disappeared with them. We lost some seriousness when reference books stopped being objects. We lost the habit of browsing from Caesar to volcanoes because your hand happened to land there. We lost those gold letters catching the lamplight on a winter evening. We lost the small family pride of owning something solid, learned, and shared. Not every relic deserves rescue. But some deserve a fond nod, a rueful smile, and an honest accounting of what we had before we traded it for... |
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