Hard times won’t allay books’ spell
Editor’s note: This column originally published April 10, 1995
I dream on my encyclopedia. My favorite volume, over the years, has been Ovid Plastering. We are old friends.
On rainy afternoons, I open Ovid Plastering at random. Today, I find Pellagra, a dietary deficiency disease. It is three long paragraphs and at the end of it, I rush to the icebox and take a vitamin B tablet. The writing is not vivid but it is authoritative.
As a further antidote to Pellagra, I flip to Luigi Pirandello, whom I read in college. Luigi and I spent many an afternoon in days past as I tried to see the deeper meaning of his Six Characters that lay beneath the fun of the thing. I never much got past the fun part and earned a C in that particular college English course.
My dream books are the Encyclopaedia Britannica. My set is 22 years old now. (EB spells the first word with an ‘ae’ in the old way.)
Last year, the EB (as insiders call it) came out with a CD-ROM computer version in which you could call up the essays on your home computer. The disks are not bound in leather. They do not have pages. They do not yellow in time and Ovid Plastering is a lost character. Perhaps Pirandello is searching for him.
Last week, EB announced it needed money. It hired the public relations firm of Ogilvy Adams and Reinhart to announce this message. Sales have slowed and some buyers think that $995 for a CD-ROM version of the EB is too much. The books cost upward of $1,500, depending on the binding and the skills of the salesmen.
EB wants investment money to survive slow times and build new times on devices like the Internet. New times look tough for encyclopedias with inferior encyclopedias already encoded in computers for free or still available in book form in groceries for less than $200. The EB was founded in 1768 in Scotland by a group of scholars from the University of Edinburgh. It is the oldest encyclopedia in the English language. It came to Chicago in the 1920s, brought here by Julius Rosenwald, the legendary merchandiser and do-gooder who headed Sears at the time.
The last titan to run EB was William Benton, another do-gooder who established a foundation that owns EB and decrees that EB profits go to the University of Chicago. The trouble now is that profits have been slim (although the public relations firm hired to announce EB’s plight says the books made money in 18 of the last 20 years - they won’t say how much or in what years the books lost money).
The EB is a Chicago treasure, unique in the world, but don’t expect a city council resolution to save it or demonstrations around the EB offices at 310 S. Michigan. It is such a quiet treasure. It has always been there. Why wouldn’t it be there tomorrow?
Encyclopedia buyers were always parents who bought the books for their kids, to give them a leg up in learning, to open a wider world for them to browse in. Like the world of Ovid Plastering. Maybe the cut-rate encyclopedias encoded on the hard disk of play computers is good enough or the book-a-weeks sold with pepperoni pizza at the supermarkets. Maybe there is no magic anymore in finding Louis Pasteur sharing the same pages with Nikita Panin and both housing themselves between the same covers with the city of Paris.
“Paris has an exceptionally large number of museums; many are outstanding for their rich and specialized collections.”
I’m sorry. I was distracted for a moment by the page open to that passage. When I was a boy, my working-class parents plunged into debt for a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica Jr., a reference set for little kids. When the box of books came, we tore open the brown paper wrappers one afternoon and the three of us kids fell under the spell of the books that rainy afternoon. Every afternoon since spent with the EB has had a little dreamy rainy-ness in it.
Yes. I still have the childhood books, too. Just as I keep rainy afternoons in my life. And keep Ovid Plastering on the shelf by the big red chair where I touch my past and command all the world of learning that ever was by turning its pages.