I didn’t know whether I should be delighted — free reference books for the taking! — or horrified: I was in a world where what used to be known as “the sum of human knowledge” was now destined, literally, for the dump.
Of course I had to rescue those bulky tomes, some of whose pages were already rain-soaked. I couldn’t bring them to my small apartment whose living room, according to some of my friends, already resembled a second-hand bookshop. But they’re in a safe, dry place now, the Britannica volumes, available to anyone who may want to get information from books and not from the internet.
As a child in the 1970’s, encyclopedias fascinated me. They’re big and thick and the sets made for children had attractive artwork, like that entry for Dick Nixon, which showed Ike’s vice president standing alone, defiant and invincible, while being pelted with rocks by the commie bast, I mean, students of Peru. As the Reader’s Digest was the main reading fare of my childhood, I was the youngest, if not the only, right-winger on our elementary school campus.
Even then my main interest was already politics and its gory extension, war. I devoured encyclopedia entries about the world wars, Hitler, the American Revolution, the American presidents, the American Civil War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Soviet Union, the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, Napoleon — the usual stuff that an elementary school student would like if he were also, as my younger brother would put it, a weirdo like me.
In sixth grade and junior high school, my interests included evolution, the stock market, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the British parliament, the French Fifth Republic, Plato, Marxism, chess and how an air-con worked. The National Library, which was a jeepney-ride away from our house, made my head spin. It had shelves brimming with what seemed to be all the encyclopedias ever printed in the English language, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
Encyclopedias were expensive, and the Britannica was the Rolls Royce of encyclopedias. Two of my uncles bought sets — Colliers and Grolier — for my cousins who preferred Marvel and DC comic books. My uncles noted, sadly, that their pricey encyclopedias would have gathered dust if not for me. Many, many years later, while visiting one of my uncles in the P.I., I took out a volume of the encyclopedia set that was my reading fare during “summer” (which is what we call the driest of our dry season: March to April). Still wedged between some of the pages were my “bookmarks”: matchsticks. I looked at the entries: one was about Chester Allan Arthur while the other was on the German Empire’s Schlieffen Plan. I guess my brother was right.
In junior high and high school, I frequently visited the homes of classmates whose parents were loaded enough to buy a complete set of the Britannica. One of my friends — this was in the 10th grade — had to shoo me away because, he said, I had been in their living room for four hours already, my head buried in one of the encyclopedia volumes, and I was freaking out his mom.
Those were good times.
These days, you no longer “look it up”; you Google it. The problem with cyberspace, however, is that nuggets of wisdom are mixed with the garbage.
I admit. I am overreacting. It is not the end of civilization as we know it. There is still, and there will always be, a need for authoritative information. What has simply changed is how we get it.
The 1953 novel “Fahrenheit 451” envisioned a future world without books. These had been obliterated by the people’s apathy and preference for new mass media (specifically, the TV). What has actually happened, and what is still happening, is that the ever improving forms of mass media have transformed books into their own image. Text is no longer printed on pages and bound between hard covers. It is now digitalized and can be read — “downloaded” — on a screen. You can no longer judge a “book” by its cover.
Is this good or bad? That’s a typical older generation question. It was also asked when the written word was invented. Heck, tribal elders probably stoned to death — or fed to fire ants — the first man who discovered fire.
But we cannot ban innovation, and thank God for that. They make our lives simpler, easier, more convenient. Every new scientific breakthrough, moreover, results in better technology.
The younger generation, to be sure, will probably find my nostalgia for books amusing. I used to roll my eyes whenever I hear older folks talk about disco dancing and 8-track tapes. But one day you kids will be adults, too, and you will, for sure, reminisce about the good old days of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
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