Ask HN: Thoughts on buying a real set of Encyclopædia Britannica
I'm thinking of getting a second hand copy of the Encyclopædia Britannica (15th edition) to read in order to improve my broad knowledge.
Does this make sense in 2023?
Does this make sense in 2023?
Relocating claimed both of them. I gave one to my sister. The second to a neighbor.
The second one was from 1957. It had the fitted bookcase...did you know there were dedicated bookcases? Neither did I until I saw one.
No room in the bookcase for yearbooks, but the bookcase had a fitted slot for the Atlas. Yes, there are matching atlases.
Now in fairness it's been almost twenty years since I gave away the bookcase set to the neighbor. I didn't haven't replaced it because I am less interested in ancient and medieval western history. There's nothing else like an old set of Britannica for that.
So I say go for it. If nothing else, it will be a conversation starter. At best, you'll find yourself sitting on the floor with a pile of books. In the worst case, you're just renting them until you pass them on.
Good luck.
There is a small "Micropaedia" where you look for a synthetic definition of something, that has references to one or more pages on the "Macropaedia" where the whatever you are looking for is talked about, but these are themed articles, they can be read as you would read an article on a newspaper or a chapter of a book.
Yes. Speaking as a person who has read the entire contents of a general encyclopedia, a science encyclopedia, and the 5 inch thick Webster's 3rd unabridged dictionary, definitely go for it. The mind, once stretched by new ideas, never returns to its original dimensions. - Emerson “Dimidium scientiae cui scit ubi sit scientia,” (Half of all knowledge is just knowing where to find knowledge)
There is something in reading from a real book that (maybe it is just me) it is non-reproducible with online reading or e-books.