![]() ![]() ![]() Interest in old encyclopedias re-surfaced last month when a long-lost volume of the Yongle Encyclopedia of 16th-century China, representing part of the world’s largest known general encyclopedia at its time, was found in California. Encyclopedic knowledge has moved to more accessible electronic media on the internet with older important editions such as the Britannica 11 th edition now in the public domain being accessible to modern scholars and other interested parties of cultural artifacts. ![]() Libraries and collectors of books of the genre of “Education/Reference” are probably the only owners of bulky sets of encyclopedias these days. The four feet of book shelf space that it occupied until the day it got sold for a small profit, was a luxury I could not afford. Soon after, I realized that there was an additional cost beyond the $20, in the form of storage real estate. As an extra bonus, it came with the Britannica Year-Book from 1913, published the year after the sinking of the Titanic. Fascinated by the idea of owning a cross section of the trunk of the tree of knowledge just prior to the First World War, when the publication was at a crossroads with its transition from being British to becoming American, I bought the 29 volumes for $20. Stopping at a yard sale a few years back, I picked up a set of The Encyclopedia Britannica 11 th edition, produced during the year 1910. ![]()
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