my window to the world…..

In 1963, my parents bought a set of World Book Encyclopedias.  At the time, it was incredible investment on the part of my parents.   All of the information from the world was held in these books, at least that’s what it seemed to me.

I would spend hour upon hour paging through these, tripping over oddities while looking for information, sometimes for research, sometimes for pleasure, but always sometimes.  Eventually, as I paged through these books, year after year, I got to know a lot of stuff. 

The World Book was a way to find things, mostly accidentally.  Things got to be interesting, not because I wanted them to be, but because they were.  I found information because it was there, not because I searched for it.  And, the more I traveled through the pages, the more curious I got.

The internet has replaced encyclopedias for the most part.  While I love scanning and getting information, it’s different than sitting down with a book.  If you saw it in World Book, it was knowledge.