It’s an expression: “I couldn’t give it away.” That summer day in 2007, I couldn’t give our encyclopedia set away. The kids had moved out, and now we were moving out, trading the big five-bedroom house for 1200 square feet in a city high rise.
There would be no room for this set of Compton’s Encyclopedias bought in the 1980s.
I guess you could say there was no need for them, either. We owned a couple laptops, a desktop computer, and two tablets, and we had cable TV and the whole worldwide web at our disposal. Not to mention a nationally renowned library just a 5-minute drive away. No, we didn’t need the encyclopedias to get information.
So they were up for grabs on that day we had opened our home for a moving sale: not just the encyclopedias, but also the accompanying yearbooks . . . along with a sombrero, a Murano glass swan, a cake pan in the shape of Big Bird, a food dehydrator, a shoe buffer, a white laminate bedroom set from the eighties, the old refrigerator in the garage that had no handle. And of this detritus of our lives as consumers, it was the encyclopedias that held the least allure for our customers.
My parents bought a set of Compton’s in the early sixties. I remember sitting on the Danish modern chair– was it the turquoise one or the orange one?–just paging through volumes. The slick, fuzzy black and white pictures were enough reward to entice me to page through on a lonely day. The encyclopedias were always a second choice after a TV show on one of three channels–Sky King, Flipper, Mr. Ed–but it was a choice I made from relatively few other entertainment options.
Sometimes the Compton’s was more than recreation. I needed it to fashion an Ohio state flag out of old sheets and shirts for a fourth grade project. Or to research Juliette Low for a Girl Scout badge. (Did you know she went deaf in one ear after a piece of rice thrown at her wedding lodged in her eardrum?) To settle an argument with my older, know-it-all brother. Or to study reproduction in preparation for a date with a high school senior. (My other resource was “The Playboy Advisor” in my uncle’s hidden magazine stash.)
I can still picture those stiff beige books lined up on the top shelf of the low-slung white bookcase my grandpa built; it took up one whole wall of our living room. On humid days in our unairconditioned house, the covers got a bit sticky, and it took a little jiggle to wiggle a volume out.
There were thousands of glossy pages with tiny authoritative print between the covers. We never questioned the veracity of a single factoid within.
Oh, it was an innocent time. We believed it all. Back when there was one truth about the Native Americans. When there was one important thing to know about the Japanese in 1941. When all of our wars were justified and winnable. It was a time of “Indians,” and “negroes” and ”Orientals.” It was a time of Important Men and supportive women.
It was so quiet between those books’ covers.
This set of smart-looking black and red Compton’s Encyclopedias I was hawking at my suburban estate sale had been a gift from my parents to our children in the eighties. They were lined up like soldiers on the bookcase in our family room. My kids used them for last-minute reports on earthquakes and meningitis, cantilevers and aardvarks.
Their high school education was surely more sophisticated than mine, because they were learning that the Compton’s wasn’t the definitive word, that they should go to the library and search for books and journals. “Primary sources,” were the gold standard, not the concise encyclopedia summations.
We had no buyers for the Compton’s at our 2008 tag sale. We could not “give them away.” We exhorted kids to take yearbooks from their birth years. But the whole megillah, A-Z, remained on the shelf, unloved, unappreciated.
It was not just our customers who shunned encyclopedias. Libraries were beginning to weed them from their own collections. Information was exploding. Perspectives were changing.
I was a school librarian at this time, and I realized that once lazy middle schoolers figured out that online 
text could be cut and pasted, and online pictures could be snagged and printed, encyclopedias were done for. When I offered a World Book or a Funk and Wagnalls to students, they acted like I was handing over clay tablets of cuneiform.
I am not sure about this, but I think we finally boxed our 1980s Compton’s up and gave them to Goodwill.
And when my parents died a few years later, I boxed up their set of 1960s Compton’s and buried them in some Goodwill graveyard, too.
It hurts to think of those encyclopedias dusty and abandoned on some shelf in one of Goodwill’s retail stores, probably displayed out of alphabetical order, upside down even, maybe next to paperback romance novels. Or maybe stacked up to make a display table for chipped bric-a-brac. Or, most likely, disintegrating at the bottom of some fermenting landfill.
Since our downsize a dozen years ago, when we sold our house and everything in it, I have regretted so little about the purge. It is okay that someone else is rocking her baby in my Bentwood rocker. I don’t mind at all that the Murano swan or the Swiss cowbell or the Alhambra plate adorns someone else’s curio cabinet. If my shoes are scuffed, I give them a quick brush, never mourning the loss of my electric shoe buffer.
But I do miss my Compton’s.
I could buy a set just like them on eBay for $24.
But it wouldn’t be the same.
Because my encyclopedias, wherever they are, have my Dad’s fingerprints, still dingy from the foundry, and my mom’s, purple from ditto fluid. My own hungry fingertips, an arch, a loop, a whorl, on this page and that. Shadows of my kids’ number 2 pencils.
Ghost images of a time gone by, of people long gone.
If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy these:
“You found what in the cake?” Homage to an Indifferent Cook, My Mom
The Club: Motherless Daughters
Downsizing: We Sold Our House and Everything in It
Books Over Nooks: An Ode to the Paper Page
How Should a House Smell
This is poetic! First of all, you have an amazing memory of the details of your past…and all those details were mine too! But I had forgotten them. But I remember that I loved our set of encyclopedias and I can see them in my mind on the shelf in our den. (Actually it is was our “solarium”) When I read your blog, I am always struck by the significance you see in all the details that others overlook.
I loved encyclopedias growing up and was always envious of my friends who had sets at home! I spent many hours at the public library using them for endless reports through school. In high school I got a job at the local public library and had to make sure the encyclopedias were in alphbetical order when I picked up left over books .
Thanks for the memories Sandy…I was right back in the library of my childhood!
I am honored that you read my writing and take time to write. I wonder if the DMS Library still has them.
This is from someone who loved getting lost in the WorldBook or Comptons or any other source of information, trivia and who knows what else. They were a paradise of sorts for me and the memory of those days is indelible. Thank you for bringing back those memories with your consummate writing skills.
You are truly gifted but then I always knew that!
You can’t imagine how thrilled I was to see your name in your comments, and I will contact you by email. That you read my words and have been so kind in yours means so much to me.
Your opinion means so much to me. I am honored that you read my writing and take time to tell me how it resonates.
Beautifully written – I can conjure up the smell of soldier-like rows of Funk & Wagnall’s displayed in the bookcase in my childhood home. They were treasure chests of information and unquestionable authorities, settling bets, proving a point, backing up arguments. Now my son chuckles if I walk to my computer to look something up instead of staying on the couch, using my phone. Modern Luddites, we don’t turn to Alexa or Siri with verbal queries. Do children today know what an encyclopedia is? Are they still published? How about print dictionaries? Thanks for this snapshot of our childhoods, Sandy. Love this.
I wonder if they still produce them. Love the speed and breadth of the Internet. The encyclopedias are placeholders for us, aren’t they? Thanks for reading and taking time to respond.
This makes me sad.
It’s bittersweet. But the truth is, love the web.
Are you sitting down? The honest truth on what has become of your beloved encyclopedia volumes: they were sold in bulk with other no-longer-needed books to a paper mill, where their hard covers were removed and the pages run through the mill, turned into pulp, and converted into new recycled paper, which might be used to create a child’s coloring book or scratch paper for an art student. Feel better now?
You’re killing me! 😉 Thanks for reading and for plunging me into reality.
Oh Sandy, so true. So sad. We had World Book. I think their covers were red in color. Since my dad is gone, and mom is recently deceased, I think they’re still sitting in their house in a low-slung varnished wooden bookcase (such as you described) which my dad made. I’ve actually thought of them periodically, wondering what it would be like reading them again. I can’t allow my sentimental self to get too interested in them. Surely NO ROOM for them 😥
I love hearing from old (whoops, former) classmates since we had such similar experiences. I loved the Finneytown library. Spent many of my lunch periods there. I can’t remember the librarian’s name, but she was nice to me even though I could never pull off a “library voice.”
I inherited my mother’s set of Compton (?) encyclopedias when she moved to a high-rise, only to give it to Goodwill. My mother with her insatiable thirst for knowledge spent a lot of time referring to them. We now have such a vast array of information sources.
Once again you write and just nail it. Oh I loved our encyclopedias as a kid. I remember now how proud my parents were when we got them. And then we got some after our kids were “ready” for them. I think we need to move because they are still on the shelf in our solarium, and I’m sure that’s the only way we will part with them. Keep writing, “you are killing me Lingo” .
My parents had the complete set of World Book Encyclopedias. I, too, remember leafing through them just for fun. It felt like we had the world at our fingertips — boy, we sure didn’t know what we didn’t know!
I loved how you ended this: with the fingerprints of your family, young and old.
We had the World Book Encyclopedias. We didn’t know what to do with them. A neighbor teaches history at a parochial school who wanted them for the kids to compare the past and the present. We gladly gave them to him. He said his kids have enjoyed them and we’re so glad they’re not sitting around collecting dust.
That must feel wonderful! Thanks for reading and letting me know, Ann. Hope you are enjoying retirement.