The Encyclopaedia Britannica was too big to throw away

In 1961, when I was 13, a man in a suit knocked on the door of my parents’ Strathfield home and persuaded them to buy a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The 25 big books, plus a cheap plywood bookcase arrived within days. The EB itself comprised 24 books (one was the index) and there was the 1962 Yearbook, which summarised the events of 1961. An ongoing subscription entitled one to have the yearbook delivered every year.

The EB’s volumes were bound in brown leatherette with fake gold embossing and the advertising blurbs described them as “handsome”. It was a very expensive investment – probably equivalent to buying a good laptop these days – but over the decades after the Second World War, thousands of sets would have been sold in Sydney, mostly by door-to-door salesmen and mostly to aspirational parents. The big pitch was that the investment would help your children get ahead in life by helping with their homework.

One seldom encounters door-to-door salesmen these days, except for creepy folk selling religion and young people trying to persuade you to change your phone or electricity supplier, but in the 1960s and ’70s they came around all the time. There were men selling sets of brushes, vacuum cleaners and life insurance and women flogging kitchenware and beauty products (“Ding dong! Avon calling!” is one of the best-remembered slogans of the era.)

There were many salacious jokes about male door-to-door salespersons and a number of urban legends. My favourite is the one about the salesman who comes to the door, in the late afternoon. The lady of the house isn’t interested in the product but the man is very pleasant and he asks, with some discomfort, if he might please use the toilet. Of course the lady obliges and the salesman thanks her profusely and leaves. A little while later she visits the bathroom and finds he’s accidentally dropped two tickets to a popular show – and they’re for that night! It’s too late to contact the man’s company (he didn’t leave a card), so the lady and her husband decide to use the tickets. That night, their house is comprehensively looted. (Recently, in the US, there’s been a persistent urban legend about Russian white slavers posing as door-to-door children’s book salespeople. Of course the origin of this nonsense is that the Slavic sellers ask questions about the children of the house).

I wasn’t much helped with my schoolwork by the EB. In fact I only ever recall reading one article and that one I pored over avidly. As a teenager I was intensely interested in guns, shooting and military stuff and as a matter of course I was a member of the school cadets. “Small Arms” (written by “H.C.T.”) covered 14 whole thrilling pages of eight point type, including two of photographs. When I sat down to write this, I pulled Volume 20 off the shelf – about 45 years since I last did – and it fell open at the right page.

Even as a teenager I quickly recognised that the EB was written very much for an American readership because it was American-owned and the US was its biggest market. It was quite frustrating to find that even quite minor US towns got an entry while an Australian equivalent didn’t rate a mention. The other problem was that articles very quickly got out of date. The 1961 article on small arms mentions the Soviet Kalashnikov rifle (AK-47), which appeared in the early 1950s, and quickly became the world’s most famous firearm, only in passing (and in error – it’s described as a submachine gun) and it isn’t even named. Really, my parents would have been better off buying a few books covering the specific topics I was interested in.

By the time I was at university in the late 1960s, the vast bulk of paper was of no further use at all. Anything I was studying required much more detailed and up-to-date information. Today’s Wikipedia with its instant free accessibility, volunteerist compilation and constant updating has overcome the problem that always dogged the EB and other dead tree imitators. Wikipedia really is, more “encyclopaedic” than the paper EB could ever have been.

When my father retired and he and mum moved to Batemans Bay, the EB went with them. It was reverently installed in a a special built-in shelf – where it still resides, decades later – and was never further consulted.

Occasionally, on online book sites, one sees queries about what a whole set of EBs plus a few of the yearbooks (“in good condition”) might be worth. The answer is nothing. They’re simply too old to have any informational value and too young to be an historic artefact. They survive through sheer inertia – too big and too imposing to throw away.