I remember as clear as anything the day our Encyclopedia Britannica was delivered. I was about eight years old and we lived in a brick Tudor house on Brantley Road. The salesman had come to our house some weeks, maybe even months earlier. He wasn't like the vacuum cleaner salesmen who knocked on the door whenever they were in the neighborhood. I'm pretty sure my mother made the appointment and he came late in the afternoon when my dad was home, and we all gathered in the library as he showed us the gilt-edged volumes and the vast amount of information they contained. We all watched my dad sign the forms -- remember carbon copies? -- to place our order, and then we waited.
My mother was the most excited. She was insatiably curious all her life until Alzheimer's robbed her of interest in anything but the present moment. The encyclopedia was a gift from my grandfather, an extravagant gift. It had a place of honor in the upstairs hall, which was sunny with a big window that looked onto the back garden. As you faced the back of the house, the encyclopedia was on the left in the small bookcase that came with it, and the window was on the right above a maple chest you could sit on to read. The only other thing on the chest was a small aquarium that held the chameleon I had bought at the Shriners' circus. In those days you could buy the little lizard with a string around its neck attached to a safety pin you attached to your coat and it would crawl around on your shoulder. My chameleon lived a long and happy life in the window opposite the encyclopedia, and my mother had to go to the pet store for meal worms to feed it.
The encyclopedia was there for all school projects, but what I remember even more was spending lazy time with it and absorbing random and probably ultimately useless information. I was undiscriminating; I'd pick a volume and read consecutive articles about places and people and documents and concepts I didn't fully understand as the day sifted toward dinnertime. I was in heaven.
I don't know when we gave it away. It probably made the move to the smaller house in the country. Did it make it to the apartment on Shaker Square? I'm certain it did not survive my parents' divorce, but the little bookcase is in my study even now, and holds my Bibles, prayer books, and the other theology books I need close at hand. It is all scratched up and could use refinishing.
What strikes me, though, on this beautiful spring morning, is what a wonder it was then to have that wealth of information sitting right there in our upstairs hallway. And how contained it was. And how quaint in light of all the information that is available to us now at the click of a mouse. I'm far from being a Luddite, but sometimes I want to flee from more information. Right now I could turn on the TV news or click over to the NYTimes website, but frankly I'd rather go sit outdoors and watch the birds than learn more about Mitt Romney, the Secret Service, or Brangelina. Oh, to imagine that all the information you could ever need could be contained in twenty-four volumes plus an index and a dictionary in a small bookcase outside your bedroom door.
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