When I was growing up, my family had a World Book encyclopedia set. This print compendium of knowledge was arranged in alphabetical order across 22 volumes bound in red leather.
At the time, encyclopedias were a common sight on living room bookshelves and in public libraries. The primary purpose of the books was to give elementary students something to plagiarize while working on school projects.
When you were assigned a country to do a presentation on in social studies, for instance, you’d gather your info from the encyclopedia’s article on, say, Germany. And even if this was, say, 1991, and the encyclopedia edition you were using came out in, say, 1985, you couldn’t be faulted for the grossly out-of-date content in your presentation—failing to account for events such as, say, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent German reunification—because the internet was many years away from coming out and it’s not like your parents were going to spring for a new 22-volume encyclopedia every time Europe rearranged itself.
Nor could you be faulted for bringing in, say, German chocolate cupcakes to provide your class a taste of traditional German cuisine, even though German chocolate cake was, in fact, invented in the United States by a non-German guy whose name just happened to be Samuel German.
Again, there was no internet and the World Book didn’t cover desserts. There was simply no way to know.
After I left home, I acquired my own single-volume encyclopedia created by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with Encyclopaedia Britannica. The latter was a World Book rival that was considered classier, possibly because of its British origins and because it spelled the name of its product “encyclopaedia” for some reason.
Back when I was a freelance journalist, I’d often refer to my Merriam-Webster encyclopedia for fact-checking purposes or for quick primers on subjects I was unfamiliar with but nevertheless assigned to write about, such as Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Or monogamy.
I still think the volume comes in handy for quick summaries of stuff. And, best of all, the book was published in 2000 and therefore remains blissfully ignorant of Covid-19, TikTok, Russell Brand, and other scourges of the past quarter century.
The entry for “Trump, Donald J(ohn),” describes him as a “U.S. real-estate developer.” Bowie, David, is described as alive. Pluto is the “ninth planet from the sun,” and God’s in his heaven.
As far as I can tell, Merriam-Webster’s encyclopedia is now out of print—though I am happy to report that the publisher is releasing a new hardback version of its Collegiate Dictionary (the 12th edition) next month. I look forward to thumbing through my copy in the future and arguing that the English language should have stopped developing with “rizz” and “dad bod,” both of which are apparently in the new edition.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, for its part, went all-digital in 2012. That leaves the World Book as the “only general reference encyclopedia still published today,” according to the publisher’s website.
The 2026 edition is available for preorder now. For $1,349, you get 22 volumes containing “tens of thousands” of entries and “more than 25,000 photographs, illustrations, diagrams, and maps.” World Book promises that extensive revisions have been made to the articles on adolescent literature, mental illness, the Olympic Games, and science, and there’s a new biography of J.D. Vance. I guess that’s supposed to be a selling point.
The set’s “Spinescape”—i.e., the picture you get from lining up the books in order and with their spines facing out—depicts the stars and stripes of the U.S. flag. World Book devises a different Spinescape for each edition; they picked the flag for 2026 as a tribute to the country’s 250th birthday.
If it’s not too late to suggest a tagline, I’ve got one: Encyclopedias and American democracy—two obsolete notions together at last!
Indirect Objects 