A Sense of Loss

One of you is scheduled to come take this 1983 Encyclopedia Britannica away Thursday or Friday. They are, in any rational sense, an obsolete marker of a 20th century literate middle class American family. You wanted a comprehensive overview of human knowledge not just for your own curiosity, but as a starting point for your kids when they started school. While encyclopedia are never a particularly good source for a research paper, like Wikipedia or Grokopedia, they were a starting point for enough knowledge to know what to ask next. 

These were a uniformly bound and in the case of the Britannica beautiful above and beyond their content. They represented an attempt at presenting a consensus of educated academics at a time when that phrase still meant something positive. 

Articles were usually anonymous but you would sometimes get surprised at identified authors for some entries. An article in the 1963 Americana (with which I grew up and which were a companion on many boring weekends when I was 10 or 11) about American English was by H.L. Mencken, about as expert a user of 20th century American English as you could pick. He is remembered today  for the acerbic "Puritanism.—The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." This is not a fair statement of Puritan concerns but it captures well Mencken's wit, and style with a pen.

Another was an article about vigilantism by Glenn S. Dumke, for many years chancellor of the California State University system,  back when that was a sign of education not Marxism or other forms of woke. His article observed what I have since discovered in my deeper reading: In Gold Rush California, vigilantism were an expression of popular justice often no worse than the legally constituted courts.

As the title of this posting implies, there is a sense of loss as these leave. They are the loss of an aspect of 20th century American middle class idealisn that for all its flaws aimed high and achieved much. They also carry a sense of wistful personal loss.  My wife and I bought these around the time our daughter was born in 1983. They were expensive (about $1100, if I recall correctly) but something of a statement that we were going to bring our daughter up in a home that put knowledge and education at the core of her life. We already had a 1963 Americana, but the Britannica was always first in class so why not the best?

Goodbye, dear friend.