Post #866643
2026-03-31 15:34 UTC
@nixCraft@mastodon.social Someone else in the thread mentioned this, but "encyclopedia salesman" used to be a job up through the 1970s. They would go door-to-door through neighborhoods and look for families with kids. Most people couldn't afford the whole set, but you could buy a volume each month for 2 years. My parents did that. I remember using them for school papers, though I was often frustrated by how sparse and short the entries tended to be, a paragraph where I wanted at least a page or two.
Replies (1)
-
@tezoatlipoca@mas.to 2026-03-31 15:39
@_the_cloud@mastodon.social @nixCraft@mastodon.social We were fortunate to have a full set of World Book. I would be supposed to be researching a project on #Paraguay and wind up reading about Penguins, petunias, pork, plumblines, plums and partisan politics. so long as I didn't have to get a different volume. I end up doing the same thing using #Wikipedia now. Need to look up something about an obscure thing and suddenly I'm learning about the seven thousand members of King Crimson.