The Book of Knowledge

     The other day at a flea market I noticed a box of old books -- a set of what looked like encyclopedias.  The elderly lady said, "Take them, they're free.  I can't sell them and I can't carry them, and my husband has a blockage in his arteries and shouldn't lift them either.  If nobody takes them today they're going to the garbage."  So I took them: a set of Grolier's The Book of Knowledge, published in Canada and revised many times over three or four generations.  That particular set was first published in 1926, and reprinted for about the fifteenth time in 1949.

     They're odd and wonderful books, not encyclopedias such as we know them.  For one, the entries aren't listed alphabetically!  The editors had the idea of dividing their essays among eighteen "departments" or fields of inquiry, and then interspersing articles from the different departments somewhat haphazardly throughout the 7200 pages and twelve or so volumes.  It's really very clever.  There are tables of contents, and there's a huge index, and there are fine-print notes at the bottom of articles whose subjects (electricity, or birds, or Germany) will be continued elsewhere, but for the most part you are meant to dip into the books at random, browsing.  You are meant not to find what you are looking for (though you can do that, if you are determined) but to find what you are not looking for.  Two of the most charming departments are titled Wonder Questions and Golden Deeds.  In the former, a child can learn why the sky is blue right next to what makes him cry and who are Lloyd's of London?  In the latter, he is meant to be inspired by rousing accounts of heroes (for instance, the runner Pheidippides, whose grueling race from Marathon to Athens culminated a series of long-distance runs that he had been asked to make for his city at war).

     Now the funny thing about that box of books is that we already had something at home called The New Book of Knowledge.  I checked, and indeed the new encyclopedias (alphabetical and all) were meant to replace the old.  And suddenly I felt like an archaeologist stumbling upon a couple of artifacts at the turn of a civilization -- just at the moment, say, when a great darkness was about to descend upon the land, and nobody at the time knew it.  Far from it; they expected quite a radiant future.

     I've got nothing against The New Book of Knowledge, in itself; it's not a bad encyclopedia, as such things go.  But it's illuminating to compare the two.  The old Book of Knowledge presumed that children would not be institutionalized for their entire lives; the new Book of Knowledge takes it for granted.  The new Book of Knowledge boasts that the editors have worked for six years "to complete an alphabetically arranged, curriculum-oriented encyclopedia, one especially designed for today's requirements . . . THE NEW BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE" (italics mine; capitals, theirs).  The editor of the old Book of Knowledge, by contrast, will not be fooled by walls and blackboards: "The editors have sought to convey to this vast multitude of men and women of tomorrow such an understanding of the world they live in as shall make their lives happier, and save the waste of precious years at school" (italics mine).

     I have never read so remarkable a sentence in any reference book -- except that the old Book of Knowledge was not really a reference book.  It was more like a field for play.  "Left to wander in this field," the editor continues, "the child will find whatever he wants . . . The child who can be left out of doors to play will find here the beginning of interest in natural things.  All the games and pastimes, all the fireside enjoyment children love, the mechanical interests of boys, the domestic interests of girls, and homemade toys for both of them  -- this is but one phase of the practical value of the book."  It's no exaggeration, this.  The new Book of Knowledge has 50 pages of articles on birds, their anatomy, their habits, and so forth, rather in the fashion of a school textbook, but the old Book of Knowledge has 9 pages on "Storks, Herons, and Plovers" alone, with information straight from the memory of an old bird watcher and afficionado (including a flashy account of a heron giving a hawk a good thrashing in mid-flight).

     The new Book of Knowledge shakes the pom-poms for the future.  If I tried my best, and I'm an old hand at parody, I could not outdo the smugness and the utter wrongness of the new Book's self-promotion: "The New Book of Knowledge is written for the children of today, who are standing on the threshold of a new world.  These children will be citizens of the 21st century" (ah, proving that the editors could add).  "They will travel in space" (well, a couple dozen will), "set up stations on the moon" (nope), "build homes under the sea" (nope).   But the old Book of Knowledge rather cherished the past, without falling to sterile traditionalism: "We will learn how much we owe to successive generations in every country.  From them we have received a rich heritage.  Let us sit down with some of the leaders, past and present, of every clime.  We can hear from them their feelings and their thoughts.  We can listen to their eloquent speeches, their inspiring sermons, their lofty prose, their stirring songs and their beautiful poetry, and we can enjoy their works of art."

     The new Book of Knowledge can't have any of that, for several reasons.  First, the old Book was unashamedly liberal in the old and honorable sense of the word: its editors believed in freedom of thought, and the equality of man, and democratic institutions more or less broadly conceived.  But the new Book pretends, before the age of political correctness, to a prim neutrality: "Bias, subtle propaganda, and value words are scrupulously avoided."  It occurs to me that the "Golden Deeds" department of the old Book was nothing other than the promotion of precious virtues: thrift, courage, generosity, self-sacrifice, related in exciting and eloquent detail.  But the new Book won't give you a lot of lofty prose, either.  That's because children can't read lofty prose, apparently.  So we are told that "the Dale-Chall readability formula is used to test the reading level of every article" in the new Book of Knowledge.  The articles were vetted by one Professor Jeanne Chall of Harvard, dumbing them down to the appropriate grade level.  Yes, indeed, O amateur archaelogist -- the darkness falls.  You are there.

     But the old Book's greatest sin I mention now, with a shudder.  "Through the use of their talents," writes the editor, referring to the world's great artists, thinkers, and statesmen, "they lifted men's hearts and fired men's souls in the eternal search for the beautiful, the good, and the true.  From them we catch a clearer vision of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man."  Them's fightin' words.  How much more sensible is the new Book's practical agnosticism: "Old 'truths' are becoming invalid; new 'truths' are opening vistas never before imagined" (scare quotes theirs).  So the old Book introduced children to Coleridge's Kubla Khan, or to the whortleberry, or to the career of Thomas Carlyle, or how to build a rustic bench (complete with mortises and tenons), or how electric current is like and unlike the flow of water through a pipe, and what was noble about David Livingston.  But the new Book dispenses with all of that.  Factual information is what it intends to deliver, and it does just that; but it does not and cannot deliver wonder.

     Finally, the old Book of Knowledge was written by human beings speaking directly to the minds and souls of other human beings, including those little ones we used to call children, back in the days when there were children.  Archaeologists have proved that these creatures once existed: half-rotten planks nailed to the side of a dead tree, or a field trodden under in the peculiar shape of a diamond, suggest that they were active and creative sorts who could learn more, and did learn more, in a day of freedom outdoors than our young can in a whole month of school.  I wonder what it might be like, to see children again.  Ah, but I forget -- I'm living at the bottom of the sea, when I'm not commuting to my station on the moon, teaching "truths" that will become obsolete by the time I retire.  Ain't progress wonderful?