Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 August 2

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August 2

Pre Wiki Encyclopedia audiences, few questions

Basically this is pre Wikipedia times question to understand view of then Encyclopedic audiences.

• Why encyclopedia customers used to buy encyclopedia?
• Why culture of buying and referring of encyclopedia was more in western world?
• What were the legitimate concerns of encyclopedic curiosity of encyclopedic audiences in western world?
• Pre wikipedia references, if any ?

Thanks Bookku, 'Encyclopedias = expanding information & knowledge' (talk) 05:01, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Your questions are rather broad. Have you read our article about Encyclopedias? It's fairly comprehensive. Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:12, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Actually core question in the list is 'What were the 'legitimate concerns/ reasons/ purposes of encyclopedic curiosity' of encyclopedic audiences ?'

Thanks for inputs.

Bookku, 'Encyclopedias = expanding information & knowledge' (talk) 09:08, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Most people using a big, many-volume, paper encyclopedia would have done so in a library, so a large fraction of encyclopedia buyers would have been libraries (public, school, academic), with the purpose of being of service to their visitors. Some private people with money to spare may have bought an encyclopedia because they cared for knowledge or they wanted to show off their enlightened attitude (and wealth). Small, single-volume encyclopedias were more common. By the 1990s, just before Wikipedia was created, encyclopedias on cd-rom appeared and were (or their pirated copies) affordable for the average person. Why mostly in the western world? See Age of Enlightenment. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:42, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

There was a widely held (and probably correct) belief that having an encyclopeadia in the home would enhance your children's education. My parents bought me a three-volume Reader's Digest encyclopeadia in the 1960s, when it became clear that my father's six-volume (?) Daily Express encyclopeadia from the 1920s wasn't able to answer all my questions. I remember sitting and reading both works aged 8 or 9, just scanning through random articles until I found something interesting. Later on, I inherited an eight volume Blackie's encyclopeadia that had been bought by my grandfather's family in the 1880s.

In the US, the very large sets of Encyclopaedia Britannica used to be sold door to door by salesmen who stressed the educational benefits to aspirational parents and offered apparently generous payment schemes - see Death of a Sales Scheme: Encyclopedia Shysters of the Door-to-Door Age.

Alansplodge (talk) 10:18, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

• There was also an element of home decorating involved… Even if one never read them, having multi-volume sets of nicely bound books on your bookshelf looked good. Ie, some people bought an encyclopedia set just for “show”. Blueboar (talk) 11:06, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

It was definitely a common middle class thing in the West; in some homes, the volumes were hardly ever opened and served as decoration as Blueboar implies. In my own case, I was continually looking up things and reading fascinating articles, so the volumes became well-worn. Having an encyclopedia in your home greatly facilitated home work and other school projects. One of the major downsides was that the printed encyclopedia would quickly become outdated... Xuxl (talk) 12:18, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Back in the 1920s, so many families bought the [weekly?] editions of the Childrens' Encyclopaedia and had them made up into bound volumes. There was a cartoon character whose name escapes me (it wasn't Pip, Squeak and Wilfred who may have been a feature of the Morning Post). The phenomenon featured as a half-hour episode in a television sitcom List of Man About the House episodes#Series 5 (1975). The spillover into the internet age is that people on Zoom calls are expected to have the family bookshelves as a backdrop. This can be taken to excess [1]. You may well wonder why, with the ongoing Lambeth Conference taking place yards from his house, any organiser would want to protect his tweets. 2.31.65.34 (talk) 15:09, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

See The Children's Encyclopædia. Alansplodge (talk) 13:27, 3 August 2022 (UTC)

• Personal anecdote here, at least to provide some perspective. Back in the day, unscrupulous companies would hire poor and down-on-their-luck people with minor criminal records to go "door to door" to sell things like magazines and encyclopedias (a key scene in the movie Office Space features just such a salesperson) and the like. These people are fantastically underpaid, usually paid only on commission, and usually in a way that vastly undervalues the work they are doing, so they really don't make much money; the companies that employ them do so under "rehabiliting convicts" or "helping the poor find gainful employment" but really they're just taking advantage of the poor to make a quick buck themselves. My parents bought a full 1982 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia from some kid in his late teens who laid out his life story on their front stoop and they felt bad for him. On the flip side, I loved that encyclopedia. I was in about 3-4 grade at the time, and multiple times over the next several years, I read the entire encyclopedia, all 20+ volumes cover to cover, plus the annual supplements (their purchase included a subscription to an annual supplement that was a sort of "year in review" volume; we had like 10 of these. They were actually pretty nice; they always got bound in the same binding as the original volume you purchased, so it looked like a matched set, if you had a later edition with a different binding, your year books came out matching the binding of your set). Long story short: We got our home set of encyclopedias because my parents felt sorry for the salesman because he was being taken advantage of by his employer, but in the end it provided me with one of my most valued memories of my childhood. I also used it a ton for researching school papers, especially in younger grades. --Jayron32 17:54, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

In the early 1970s, my parents didn't have a multivolume encyclopedia on their shelves, but they had various single-volume reference works. I was impressed when visiting cousins in another state that they had a Britannica set. At one point in the mid-1970s my mother offered to buy a World Book set for me, but I was already too old for it then. We were sometimes bothered by door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. I would have wanted Britannica in my later high-school years, but I vaguely remember that the price didn't seem worth it to my parents and me... AnonMoos (talk)

From our article The Children's Newspaper:

Following the successful publication of The Children's Encyclopædia as a part-work between 1908 and 1910, the title was immediately relaunched as The New Children's Encyclopædia. This new edition, published in monthly parts from March 1910, added a supplement in September 1910 entitled The Little Paper which carried news stories of interest to children. This idea was expanded by Mee into the 12-page, tabloid-sized Children's Newspaper which debuted on 22 March 1919, priced 1½d.

During my childhood, we had a copy of Knowledge. It was originally a series of magazines that built up week-by-week into an illustrated encyclopaedia, but that's not how we got it - my parents picked it up second hand some time in the late 1970s, more than 10 years after it was published. As I recall, it wasn't alphabetical - there was an alphabetical index volume that told you where to find whatever article you were looking for.

Why buy it? They had three children with homework to do, two of whom (my brother and I) were bookish kids who liked that kind of thing anyway. I didn't read it cover to cover, but certainly recall browsing through it on rainy days. Chuntuk (talk) 22:13, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

banned user
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
The Children's Newspaper which we had from that era (made up into bound green volumes by our grandparents) was definitely broadsheet. 2A00:23C5:C719:7201:AC86:666F:575F:2F7C (talk) 10:17, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Knowledge was also published as an 18-volume set of books (Knowledge - The New Colour Encyclopaedia); I still have a set (books, not individual magazines inserted into a folder). The copyright notices range from 1960 on Volume I to 1964 on Volume XVIII. I presume that those correspond to the magazines. Mitch Ames (talk) 08:40, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

reward collections

There have been massive rewards offered for information regarding Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Who collected when the former was killed back in 2011? Who will collect now the latter has been killed recently?2603:7000:8100:F444:D571:B2FF:E80:E9F1 (talk) 08:33, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

I couldn't find anything on Google, but if anyone did receive payment for informing on these people, they probobly wouldn't want anyone to know about it for obvious reasons. Alansplodge (talk) 10:21, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

AFAICT, officially at least, no one collected the reward for Osama bin Laden [2] [3] as it involved information from a lot of different sources with most coming from surveillance rather than intelligence from individuals. See also [4] which suggests of that intelligence that did come from individuals, a fair amount of it came from detainees including some of who were tortured for it. Nil Einne (talk) 12:52, 2 August 2022 (UTC)