Pam Stone | Memories of Britannica

But it’s sad, isn’t it?

A gleaming set of Encyclopedia Britannica graced the bookshelves of many well-to-do households through the ages and were considered somewhat of a status symbol. Parents of lesser means, still wanting to assist the education of their children, displayed copies of World Book, but it simply wasn’t as impressive. Rather like having a new Buick in the driveway instead of a Cadillac to show off to the neighbors.

I have vivid memories of our own set, purchased second-hand by my father sometime in the early 1950s, and when I began leafing through them in the early ’70s, even I realized how dated they were, but nearly daily, I stood on the couch to drag down a hefty volume, which pleased my father to no end.

Encyclopedia Britannica 9781615353170 2010 Deluxe « Valene Vettel

I always liked Encarta, but it conflicts with other software required, I can not use it. I wanted an encyclopedia / dictionary combination at hand, so I tried Encyclopedia Britannica Deluxe 2010. The papers I have searched tailor gave good information and a bit of it, and it is good to be able to compare what Britannica gives me with what I found elsewhere. Since my goal was to have a reference locally installed, I did not use Britannica Online.

My enthusiastic observations are: the application loads very slowly on a pretty fast computer (fully installed on the hard drive).The search in the dictionary is quite slow and the results look very short. The language dictionaries are only in English and Spanish, while I remember with emotion the capabilities German, French, Italian and Encarta.

Happy Birthday, Ai Weiwei!

1. By Kelsey Sheehy Encyclopedia Britannica stopped the presses on its biennial reference books in March 2012, triggering a wave of nostalgia for the 32-volume set. "I spent many hundreds of hours with those gold-embossed Britannica volumes on my lap,
2. The successful sculptor, architect and open critic of the Chinese government turns 55 today, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Ai comes from a family of dissident sentimentality, as his mother and poet father were sent to a labor camp in the
3. In this tome, Jacobs, a pop-culture junkie and magazine editor, presents a memoire of the year he spent reading all 32 volumes of the 2002 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (that's 33000 pages with some 44 million words). This may sound boring,
4. An era of printed reference guides is coming to an end, with the news that the last Encyclopedia Britannica have been printed, and the company is now focusing its resources online. But how reliable and extensive are online information directories?
5. The Chicago-based Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. said taking the reference book out of print was due to declining sales. The encyclopedia saw its peak in 1990, with 120000 sets sold in the United States. For much of the last century, owning a Britannica