The glory of the Encyclopedia Americana

It’s a painful process many of us must go through: culling a big book collection, amassed over a lifetime, before moving home. You know it makes sense, as you’ve struggled to house all your books – thousands of them – and they include quite a few you frankly wouldn’t miss. This chore awaits me at some point in the near future, but I do know that my 20-volume Encyclopedia Americana and its sister publication, the 20-volume children’s encyclopaedia called The Book of Knowledge, will be coming with me.

They were published by The Grolier Society of New York in 1957. They take up an inordinate amount of space on my bookshelves and I barely look at them from one year to the next: we reach for the internet when we want information. And 1957 – really? It was another world back then. But these two sets of books bound in handsome burgundy leather have been with me since childhood and I won’t abandon them now.