[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

A many people on this list all know this by heart but since
this is testimonial time -- and not all of you know me that
extensively -- very briefly:

First modern encyclopaedia me and my sister had was a
very cheaply produced set called Combi, written in
Finnish, with 5 colour printed volumes, and two with
mostly linedrawing thumbails, with very short articles.
Used to take those on our family sailing trips, long and
short. Soon had read the coloiur printed volumes of
what we might call featured articles from front to
back, several times. Just last year, shed a few
quite nostalgic tears recently after going through
the effects of my recently deceased mother, but
for involved reasons which I won't go into had to
throw them into the trash, wondering if that was
only set of that still existing.

We did have older encylopaedias, and their coverage
*was* both more interesting and very their treatement
much more in depth, if for natural reasons far from
up to date.

But to Ecnyclopaedia Britannica. I own the set that
was printed and published 1974-1975. As a child I
would choose the library I skipped class at for two
things. The library had to have either a good set
of Plato's Dialogues or Britannica, or ideally
both -- constrained somewhat by opening hours,
in my choice. I do believe I have consulted the
print EB in the last year or two, with good results,
on subjects where Wikipedia still has notable
lacunae, notably the arts. Those instances
are however mostly notable for their scarceness.

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Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]