An old Encyclopaedia Britannica is a work to cherish

Perhaps if you were a rich, white man interacting with another rich white man. In no other context does this seem true.

Standard Ebooks also has a growing collection of formatted epubs of the Great Books—necessarily incomplete, as much of the full set is still copyrighted. https://standardebooks.org/collections/encyclopaedia-britann...

I wish there was a proper offline version of the GSE, since consulting it through https://www.thefreedictionary.com is rather cumbersome.

Or if you ask about Chenghiz Khan, lots have been written about him. I have "CHINGGIS KHAN: The Golden History of the Mongols" from Folio Society (https://www.amazon.com/CHINGGIS-KHAN-Golden-History-Mongols/...), a book from roughly 7 centuries ago from his contemporaries. It reads like a mixture of poetry and really bloody fantasy. All of the geographic places are unrecognizable to modern reader. Great stuff.

An example: https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Gosplan

"What things do we claim to believe today despite knowing they are factually incorrect, due to pressure from the government?"

The absolute worst thing about time-travel movies (e.g. Back to the Future) is the pandering to modern audiences: "These kids are so dumb! They don't know about Chuck Berry duck-walking!"

I bought the ninth edition so I could have copy in my own bedroom; I was possessive about books as a child.

I bought the thirteenth edition after reading an article in the New Yorker magazine about the eleventh. I’ve added a screenshot of the first page of that article to my website above.

As explained in that New Yorker article as well as in the parent Spectator article, those old Britannicas made particularly good reading for people who like reading deeply about miscellaneous topics. Later editions aimed for more objectivity and, because of all that happened in the twentieth century, had to cover more topics on the same amount of (or even less) paper. That made them less suitable for expository writing and for recreational reading.

From 1986 until 2005, I worked at home as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator. I translated a wide variety of texts about many topics, many of which I was not familiar with (currency sorting machines, oil refinery equipment, Korean ceramics, automobile racing, French film, ...). Since going to a library to look up a few words or facts would take a lot of time, I gradually acquired a large collection of paper dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference books. I also bought quite a few CD-ROM references, though most of those had the same content as the paper versions.

Beginning in the late 1990s, first with search engines (AltaVista, Google) and then with Wikipedia, it became quick and easy to look up facts online, and I gradually stopped using paper references.

As others have noted here, Wikipedia is not as entertaining a reading experience as the old Britannicas, which could be opinionated, even witty, while also reflecting the prejudices and biases of the authors and their age. Wikipedia’s great strength is its breadth. The topics covered in Britannica have always been slanted toward matters that mainstream academics and educators consider important and legitimate. It was nearly useless for pop culture and subculture topics, and it didn’t have enough space for all of the obscure stuff that Wikipedia covers in often obsessive detail.

Of course Wikipedia has problems with errors, vandalism, and sometimes sloppy writing, but overall it is a magnificent achievement. I am very grateful to be able to use it.