A lulu of a lady sold my parents a set of the World Book Encyclopedia. Miss Lulu Goolsby to be exact. It changed my life living in rural Georgia as I did. I read that set from A to Z at least three times.
Back then the only library in the world was our school’s library—Miss Sarah Spratlin’s one-room collection of books organized by the Dewey Decimal System. The 200s covered Religion, the 600s Technology, and the 800s covered Literature. We had to memorize all ten classes, and walk on command to a given classification where it sat on the shelves.
In the early 1960s, unlike today, we were not drowning in information. We had no Google, the uber-fast search engine. I was not without resources, however. That 1961 World book Encyclopedia, a handsome set of books rich with information, photographs, and illustrations kept me busy. I read the entire set from the first word in the “A” volume to the last word in the “W-X-Y-Z” volume. That set of red, blue, and gold books, marketed as a “family encyclopedia, was my google. Many homework assignments owed their success to those books of knowledge. On a rainy cold winter day, I would grab a volume and read it from cover to cover…