Did you grow up with a set of Encyclopedias in your house?

[aliantha]

I, snobbishly of course, acknowledge Brittanica for helping me to achieve a 780 on my verbal SAT

That explains how you beat the hell out of all of us at Take Two....

We had two sets: one incredibly ancient set that my brother used, goodness only knows which publisher, and a Funk & Wagnalls set from the early '70s when I was getting close to entering high school. I can date the F&W set almost precisely because the binding was red, white and blue, in honor of the US bicentennial in 1976.

They must not have been a terribly fabulous reference because I don't remember using them all that often. Mostly I used the encyclopedias at school -- World Book, yeah, and Brittanica.

The cooler book, imo, was the unabridged dictionary. It had a set of anatomical plates on clear plastic-like material -- you could flip the pages and see the different layers of organs in the torso. I seem to remember it had illustrations of some dinosaurs and so forth, too. But maybe that was another book.

When my kids were small, we had a Grolier encyclopedia on disk. Now *that* was cool -- all those books, smushed down into one disk! Of course you still had the obsolescence problem with an encyclopedia on disk; somehow the "yearbook" disk idea never really worked out....

[CovenantJr]

'No' is the short answer. I recall us having a one-volume encylcopedia in a red dust jacket, but it wasn't particularly comprehensive, and the entries tended to be short and blunt.

[Ki]

Yep, we sure did. I remember it being quite expensive, and we really didn't have the money but Mom felt it was important for us to have them so she bought them for us. She kept them until she died. Wonder what happened to those...need to ask my sister.

[Auleliel]

For as long as I can remember, we have had a complete set of Encyclopedia Brittanica in our front hallway bookshelf. It really is two sets, one "macropedia" and one "micropedia". The "micropedia" has half as many volumes as the "macropedia", but both have sporadic illustrations. I used them frequently during grade school and high school, but am rarely home often enough to use them in college (they're probably too out-of-date to be useful now anyway). I did like to randomly pick them up and page through them. Especially as a kid when our punishments were to "sit on the stairs" as a time out. I could just reach the encyclopedias from the stairs, and often read an article or two before the timer beeped and I was free once more. I learned many lessons from my time outs.

[drew]

We had a Funk and Wagnel's set that my dad bough one book at a time from the Grocery store. I think it took him, like a year and a half, cause they'd only release a new volume every few weeks...that one was from the late seventies.

In the mid eighteees, we got the old standby..the Word Book...only got the year book for two years though...although with the subscription, we got a set of science books, and a set of Classic litterature books (I think it included King Arthur, Treasure Island, LIttle Women and a few others)

Like most of you, I used to sit and read them.
What I'd do is look something up, and while readig it, it would have suggetions to other related articles, so I'd got to that article, and then to the one that one suggested and so in.

I guess the modern way of doing that would be going to Wikipedia and clicking on all the hyperlinks (although the big difference being that most of the stuff in World Book as Accurate)

[Sorus]

World Book from the mid-80's... spent hours reading them, and any other reference-type books I could get my paws on.