On a shelf in my study, I keep a black‑and‑white snapshot of me and my father taken forty years ago. I’m nine years old in the picture, but look closer to seven, and at this long temporal remove, I can still read the photograph with a pretty fair idea of the circumstances in which it was taken. I am willing to guess that it was shot on a Sunday morning, after we’d returned from church, because there I am, standing on the back patio in blue serge dress pants and a Little League jersey.
Let’s deconstruct that outfit. In 1961, I played, badly, for the Stewart Manor Golds, but sometimes on weekends still wore the shirt from my previous season with the Reds; embarrassingly enough, it still fit. (The Reds were sponsored by the pharmacy on the town’s main street, Covert Avenue, and the white lettering on the back of our jerseys advertised COVERT DRUGS. Top that for innocence.) As for the blue serge pants: they were from my first communion, two years before, and while my mother may have lowered the cuffs an inch, they still fit, too.
The combination of these garments has more evidentiary value than their size. In fact, I can almost guarantee you how the ensemble came about. Asked to go upstairs and change after our arrival home from church—“We’re going to take pictures”—I would have started to do so, getting out of my shirt and clip‑on tie. But before I could change pants, I would have fallen upon the encyclopedia, into a paradise of life stories and statistics and dates from which my mother’s call, or the tap of her broom handle on the kitchen ceiling below my bedroom floor, finally had to summon me.
For one six‑month stretch of my childhood, the great weekly treat—more nourishing and less perishable than the strawberry ice‑cream cone that followed Mass—was that encyclopedia, its twenty-two volumes purchased, Friday night after Friday night, at a stiff promotional discount, at the grocery store on Covert Avenue. Did we get it at Bohack’s—this I can’t remember for sure—or at the A&P, where we usually went, a block down from the drugstore? As food markets went, the latter was decidedly pre‑super—a tiny, dim place with wooden floors and perhaps two cash registers, a relic of the town’s 1920s origins, and nothing like the vast fluorescent expanses of postwar plenty that had already become the suburban norm. But I’m pretty sure it’s where we bought the world‑encompassing Illustrated Home Library Encyclopedia, which I’ve just been able to locate in the evidently misnamed Kister’s Best Encyclopedias (2nd ed., 1994), a consumer’s guide to the field:
The Illustrated World Encyclopedia derives from a 20‑volume set published in 1954 entitled the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Knowledge. It was described by Padraig Walsh in his Anglo‑Amer-ican General Encyclopedias, 1703–1967 (p. 82) as “[having been] . . . designed to be offered as a premium through chain and department stores and food super-markets, and, in at least one instance, it was offered as an induce-ment to purchase a television set.” Exactly the same encyclopedia with an atlas volume added ap-peared around the same time under the title Illustrated Home Library Encyclopedia.
Well! I’ll have Mr. Kister know that we had the first color television set on our block, and that it had nothing to do with the IHLE: my hardworking father won it in a salesman’s raffle in Philadelphia. We would never have bought it ourselves, and we simply couldn’t afford the Encyclopædia Britannica. When my mother went to the A&P on Friday nights, it was with twenty-five dollars to feed the four of us for a week. I cherish her for carrying home those twenty-two volumes. Neither she nor my father had completed high school, though she eventually finished at night, when I was in the fourth grade. I helped her with her American-history homework, and the low‑budget IHLE played its part.
Its twenty-two volumes were no flashier than the A&P. They had rough maroon buckram for the covers and, on the spines, dignified gold lettering with little ovals for the volume numbers. The books surely looked too serious for where they were going in our house, onto some white wooden shelves in what we called the den, to share space with board games, comic books, and record albums.
It amazes me that they survived intact. We had a casual, kinder‑centric household, and in my memory we never had a set of checkers or a game of Careers or Clue that wasn’t, within a month of purchase, missing some of its pieces or play money. (This was mostly the fault of my sister and her friends, but why bring that up now?) If the IHLE survived—and it did, without a volume missing or a single page torn—that was because of a reverence accorded it beyond anything else in the den. We used the encyclopedia all the time, for school reports and, in my case, just to read; but we understood that these twenty-two books were to be respected as the embodiment of knowledge itself.
I’ve just, for the first time in decades, taken a good look at the set, and the only thing to come tumbling out from between the pages has been a thin strip of green‑tinted cellophane—whether a pull‑strip from my father’s Tiparillo packages or a shred of plastic excelsior from one of our Easter baskets, I’ll never know. The only defacement anywhere is a bit of underlining within the entry for the letter “A” itself: “A few hundred years later the Greeks began to use the Phoenician alphabet … . ” Did I do this? As part of some quickly abandoned scheme to read straight through the row of books, all the way to Zanzibar, with the goal of maximum, testable retention? That sounds like me at nine years old; the project would have lasted half an hour, until I realized that no amount of application could survive the 5,025 pages of distractions beyond “A” and “Aa” (“There are forty rivers in Europe with this name”) and “Aachen.” In fact, the man from Zanzibar, whom I gazed upon the moment he came home from the supermarket, remains as vivid to me as my first glimpse of John the Baptist or Howdy Doody: the fringe on his turban still looks like a crown of thorns, and his expression is as angry as his face is handsome. This confluence of eros, religion, and exoticism made his residence in volume 20, the last volume of text, a necessity; for surely, with him, things had gone, as the Oklahoma! album on another shelf in the den put it, about as far as they could go.
In the whole set, I can find only one dog‑eared page, also in the first volume. The point of the turned‑down corner rests inside the brief article on amnesia, whose last sentences in some way typify the IHLE ethos:
For many years, doctors did not know very much about amnesia or how to treat it. They have come to understand it well only since World War I. … Fortunately, amnesia does not occur very often, and there is very little danger that you or anyone you know will ever have a bad case of this mental trouble.
Perhaps I marked the page out of sheer relief over not having to add this to the long list of things, topped by Billy McAleavey and Hell, that I worried about. The IHLE did not want me to worry, about anything. Its whole message is one of onward‑and‑upwardness and reassurance.
Its world is the best of all possible worlds. We knew, in 1960, that children were starving in India; they had just stopped starving in Europe, and the parental clean‑your‑plate imperative had been updated with new unfortunates. But in the IHLE, whose acronym I’ve taken to pronouncing as “isle,” the sample children of India, in a photograph near that of a fakir on a bed of nails, are enjoying “a typical Indian breakfast … of rice, chappati (flat bread), and goat’s milk.” Westward across the Arabian Sea, but just east along the shelf in volume 12 (INS to LAB), four Iraqi schoolchildren illustrate how, in their country, “more and more of the people are learning how to read and write.” As always, in (on?) the IHLE, good relations with the United States are a help: an American diesel tractor tills the field in a photo above the newly literate Iraqis. But things are bright even in the Communist world—one hears about the “fine, prosperous farms” of Czechoslovakia—and in the colonial empires, too. There is no Ghana yet (liberated too late for my 1957 edition), but the Belgian Congo appears to be calm, hygienic, and improving all the time.
If children my age had a sense that we had missed something momentous in World War II—there’s the widowed Mrs. Roosevelt wearing a big corsage, on page 4159, looking just the way she did in the Good Luck margarine commercials—we also had no doubt that we were the “greatest generation,” the one for which this best of all possible worlds was being scientifically and socially perfected. “Geriatrics is a new branch of medicine that studies diseases of older people”—and diseases, as we knew from polio, only awaited their cures, which would certainly come by the time we were geriatric. “Social diseases” were susceptible to their own sort of antibiotics. Juvenile gangsters, the IHLE promised us, come mostly from “poor or unhappy homes, and their chief trouble is lack of love and understanding and proper training.” Lynching is illegal, “and no respectable person approves of it,” but the important thing to keep in mind is that lynchings “have become very rare.” The two pictures illustrating the article on “Negroes” are breathtakingly juxtaposed. A smiling woman at a scrub-board reminds the young reader that, whatever their hardships, “Negro people retained their friendly good humor,” while to her right, a handsome young doctor reading a thermometer announces the race’s progress into the professions (“Many are teachers and lawyers”). Like the atom in the famous school film, the Negro was Our Friend.
Did we really need such coddling? Were we really such Candides? From this encyclopedia, one would assume the average prison to be as well funded and salubrious as the average gentleman’s club. Waterloo and the Somme seem really to have been fought on the playing fields of Eton, for all the blood allowed to spill onto the IHLE. And a paragraph of modern German history manages a benignity that can only be deemed atrocious:
No people in the world have been better educated or more advanced in science than the Germans. This has been the chief reason that Germany has been so powerful in manufacturing and also in war. Germany’s population has often been so big that there was not enough land for all the people, and Germany has tried to take territory from neighboring countries. This has led to wars in which the Germans have fought against several other powerful countries at the same time, and so have lost.
So overpopulated, but so outnumbered!
Forget genocide: in the mind of the IHLE editors, children couldn’t handle so much as a broken home: “Though the courthouse at Reno is known for divorces,” one caption assures, “the marriages there outnumber divorces by a ratio of 5 to 1.”
The other day I got hold of the latest World Book, in order to make a test case of Richard Harding Davis: would such a mustily colorful figure, worth one paragraph in the IHLE, survive at all in a contemporary children’s encyclopedia? I was pleased to find him still alive, so to speak, with three paragraphs to his name, though just eleven pages away from “Death.” I browsed over to see what the World Book might be serving up for today’s young people on that subject. Just about, and frankly, everything—from rigor mortis to living wills to physician‑assisted suicide. One can’t really argue with this—and how way cool is it to have James Dean on the page facing this subject?—but it’s not hard to feel a certain tenderness toward the IHLE’s anodyne denial. It was an encyclopedia full of its own V‑chips, preparing us for a world that didn’t really exist outside its pages. My IHLE was full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that gave delight and hurt not.
At this distance, some of the production appears exasperatingly bad. Betsy Ross (in those days a mildly feminist subject for elementary‑school “reports”) is shown in a sketch with George Washington, as she “argues in favor of using a five-pointed star in the American flag.” She gesticulates with a pair of scissors. Her expression is so vexed, and Washington’s so cluelessly benign, that the two of them might as well be Squeaky Fromme and Gerald Ford.
The IHLE made the world into a costume party—young people of all nations, no matter how industrialized, tend to appear in “native” garb: the Irish colleen in her “typical hooded cloak,” the Dutch boy in his wooden shoes. These tourist‑board photos (actually, I now see the Dutch boy credited to “Standard Oil Co.”) were, in fact, no worse than the ones grinning from the “film strips” we watched in sixth grade, but they were the least of the IHLE’s problems. Kenneth F. Kister calls it, in that encyclopedia of encyclopedias, “very much a substandard reference work,” and I’m afraid I have to wince at the accuracy of his indictment:
Deficiencies included uneven coverage, superficial treatment, numerous factual and typographical errors, an inconsistent writing style, frequently out‑of‑date articles, and illustrations that were often too small, too dark, and of minimal information value.
One point here is unjust: I would say the writing was consistently awful. It contains few dependent clauses (as if they were another worldly snare from which we needed protection), and its staccato recitations contribute to a sense that knowledge is strictly a matter of facts. Who, what, when and where get their due, but why appears with the infrequency of a substitute teacher who hasn’t taken the loyalty oath. In a 305‑word article on the Peróns, there is simply no time for why:
She was very popular with the people, who called her “Evita,” and her death in 1952 was mourned by the whole country. The city of La Plata was renamed Eva Perón in her honor, but in 1955 the name was changed back.
This fickleness must have had something to do with the way those “who opposed [Juan] Perón’s ideas were imprisoned or driven out of the country.” But since “the whole country” mourned Evita, did Juan start doing that only after she died?
We were learning to “outline” in school, making old‑fashioned hierarchical arrangements of our notes under Roman numerals, then capital letters, then small. On the IHLE, however, the organization of points within an article does not seem to have been at a premium. Let’s go to the capital of Iceland:
The hot‑water supply of the city is taken mostly from natural hot springs rather than from man‑made heating systems as in most cities. During World War II, Great Britain and the United States used Reykjavik for military bases. Its name is sometimes spelled Reikjavik.
Once in a while the editors seem to indulge their own peculiar tastes. “Clubfoot” gets almost as many lines as the Peróns—though, rest assured, “Doctors can cure many cases.” And one finds at least a smidgen of pandering to the targeted demographic: I don’t think I ever read the article on “gland,” but I have just made a vivid reacquaintance with the bearded lady and the midget in two of the illustrative photos.
And yet, how fair is it to cuff these twenty-two volumes around? Are they not still the fond embodiment of my parents’ good intentions? And for all the IHLE’s shortcomings, did it not inform and sometimes even shock me? I still remember my first sight of the pie chart on page 4728: thirty-four million Catholics in the U.S. as opposed to fifty‑six million Protestants? We were only number two? You sure didn’t get that impression from anything Mother Virginia said during Wednesday‑after-noon religion classes at St. Anne’s.
What’s more, in the past few weeks the IHLE has been educating me all over again, not so much with facts about the world as with clues to myself. I recognize certain inclinations and personality traits that it either helped to form, or that, perhaps already existing, governed my roamings within the volumes. Andorra! Its 175 square miles (pop. 5,200) became my imaginative home away from home, along with Liechtenstein and San Marino, other minor characters in the family of nations, and more interesting to me than China or Brazil. The IHLE had an almost biblical way of making the last seem first: as a state and a President, Rhode Island and William Henry Harrison were entitled to the same bold rubrics as Texas and FDR. I was regularly drawn to the smaller, less consequential entities placed amidst the bigger. (Because I was always the shortest boy in the class?) When I look at the IHLE’s photo chart of Civil War figures, the Union and Confederacy lined up at the top and bottom of the page, facing off like two halves of a chess set, I recall how, in school debates, I was glad to play George III and Jefferson Davis. This taste for the marginal, the defeated, the reactionary: where did it come from, during a childhood where I rarely heard a harsh word? I’m not sure, but it’s still there, in these novels I write today about the incidental figures within great events; and it was there then. I’m drifting away from my subject, perhaps; but cross‑referencing is a principal task of encyclopedia makers, and my trip back to the IHLE has been nothing if not associative.
Whatever my inclination toward minor keys, I did have a clear preference for capital letters over lowercase ones—which is to say, proper nouns over the common variety. The articles I remember are invariably the ones about specific persons and places—almost never phenomena and concepts. I can dimly recall the pictures of the little girl making faces to illustrate the entry on “emotion,” but I preferred an individual’s sad life story—let’s say that of Stephen Foster, dying with thirty‑eight cents in his pocket. Similarly, I would have avoided the presidency (“You can read how this system works in the article on the ELECTORAL COLLEGE”) in favor of the Presidents.
All my enduring impressions of our first thirty-four chief executives derive from this encyclopedia. Harding, as handsome as he may have been corrupt (even the IHLE couldn’t cover it all up), had been born on November 2, my birthday, as had James Knox Polk. I wasn’t so miniature‑minded as to be unsusceptible to the then‑considered‑normal boy’s ambition to grow up to be president, and I’m sure I worried, once we got to lessons on probability, whether three Novem-ber 2 presidents wouldn’t be too much to ask from the calendar.
My interest in politics had been firmly fixed by the fall of 1960 and the Kennedy‑Nixon election. A fourth‑grade teacher applauded my enthusiasm in the comments portion of my report card, but told my parents that she hoped my “natural feeling for the biological sciences” would be encouraged. (What she may have been thinking of—a precocious cloakroom incident?—is beyond me.) The IHLE wanted, in any case, to stoke the fire in the belly of its young (male) readers. “How He Became President” is a subsectional title within all those thirty-four White House articles; but in the case of a minor magistrate like Hayes, no subhead exists over what he actually did once he got there.
The editors regarded inspiration as crucial, and I was more than ready for extra helpings of it. Take Millard Fillmore, who gave his name to the first street I lived on, in a town more modern than Stewart Manor. (Its suburban grid was so instant and sprawling that even Fillmore had to be pressed into the service of nomenclature.) The IHLE reminds us that, in order to save money, our thirteenth president “walked all the way to Buffalo at the age of twenty‑one.” Alas, with typical slipshodness, the article neglects to say exactly where he walked from, the lack of mileage leaving the zeal somewhat ambiguous.
The pictures have proved even more lasting in their effects than the stories. If not so thin‑lipped and forbidding as Andrew Jackson, the incumbent President Eisenhower nevertheless seems a very serious‑looking man, rather impatient, holding his eyeglasses in his left hand, as if he’s just taken them off and is waiting for the photographer to get this over with so he can get back to work. I have always had trouble, a result of this picture, absorbing the shorthand historical Ike, all smiles and golf. Herbert Hoover, seated and shot from a distance amidst baronial surroundings, looks appropriately unapproachable for the role in which history cast him. Andrew Johnson grips the knob of an armrest on his chair as if he’s driving a stick shift or, more likely, is just full of anxiety; only this week have I noticed that Lincoln is sitting in the same chair (in Mathew Brady’s studio, no doubt), his hand calmly dangling from the arm support.
The power of many of the photos in the IHLE—Roger Bannister collapsing after his run; white latex pouring from a tree trunk (it nauseated me)—has hardly diminished, even if latter‑day viewing, re-creating the sensations they induced, makes them seem like reproductions of themselves, photographs of photographs. The encyclopedia’s sketches, even less distinguished than its prose, provide nothing like the same shocks of recognition. Hitler and Goebbels and Goering are all rendered with pen and ink instead of photography; they look like the villains in Dick Tracy, squashed and exaggerated. I’m unable to conclude whether this reflects mere artistic incompetence or, again, some desire to protect children. Goering’s brutality seems to be frankly acknowledged, but the language is unmistakably that of a fairy tale: “Goering was a very vain man who liked to wear gaudy uniforms. He was also a very cruel man who liked to kill animals and to see blood.” Hitler, too, lies safely locked in past tenses and passive verbs: “Hitler was a strange‑looking man . . . ” I remember the phrase, a sort of physiognomic warning. Maybe one could spot such a person. The two henchmen, Goebbels and Goering, are put into a sort of alphabetical hell: they’re on the same page with only one entry be-tween them—“goeduck: . . . one of the largest clams in the world, and some people say that it is also the ugliest.” If the IHLE itself was irony‑proof, it still couldn’t repeal the strange juxtapositions of life itself. (Goethe was ready to redeem the German nation once you turned the page.) Alas, it would help if the editors could spell correctly: the ill‑favored clam they have in mind is actually the geoduck, which belongs closer to the various Kings George than to those two Nazi war criminals.
One picture, above all others, changed my life—or, at least my sense of life, which amounts to the same thing. “The first sunlight photograph of a human face was taken by John W. Draper in 1840. The exposure time was six minutes.” The subject is unnamed by the IHLE, but there she sits, in her bonnet, the first verified person to my way of thinking. It’s how I see her still, as someone more real than anyone who had come before her. (This idea, if it can be called that, propelled half of the last novel I wrote.) She resides in my memory with the French singer we all saw live, from Paris, in the summer of ’62, via the first Telstar broadcast. Its annihilation of space meant nothing to me; the event was entirely about the surrender of linear time (the hours it would take to fly a tape to New York) to simultaneity: a partial victory to be sure, but unspeakably thrilling.
The IHLE turns out to have been an impermanent place. One long, boldly titled article—“Let’s play Canasta!”—now seems as much a relic of the fifties as a shocking pink motel. The present‑day reader can’t help looking for such things: Boy Scouts raising the forty-eight‑star flag; postwar/prewar Hanoi (“factories where they make fine wool and beautiful silk cloth”); the untrod Moon, which depends on “an artist’s idea” for depiction of her landscape. The world—to which we were being introduced, from which we were being protected—was rendering the IHLE obsolete and false even as we used it. The encyclo-pedia’s picture of the Seattle skyline came to be missing the Space Needle; Dag Hammar-skjöld was soon dead, not alive; and Negroes—just look at TV—were hardly in a “good humor.” At times the IHLE came to seem like that most loathsome and irreparable creature: the adult you had caught in a lie.
But mostly, as I grew, it resembled the clunky, embarrassing old friend I wanted to drop in favor of some new god of the baseball diamond or dance band. It would be years before I was ready for the Encyclopædia Britannica, and by the time I was, it had destroyed itself, with that horrible facelift, into a macropedia/micropedia. Meanwhile, the Britannica Junior’s very name was off-putting—we could spot the condescension even in the sixth grade—and neither the Encyclopedia Americana nor Compton’s ever made much of an impression. No, what one really would have liked to bring home to that shelf in the den was the World Book, with its shiny paper, plastic‑layered anatomy charts, and color photos. (The IHLE’s most pathetic visual effort lies on page 1327, a color‑blind-ness chart that’s done in black and white. Readers were assured that “a person who is color‑blind cannot see the number 89 when this chart is made up of red, green, yellow and blue dots.”)
In his biography of Diderot, P. N. Furbank reminds us that the great Encyclopédie of the eighteenth‑century philosophes displays “a very slighting attitude towards history,” and that “by deliberate principle, there are no biographical articles—or at least none as such, though the lives of some famous people are smuggled in incidentally, for instance under the name of a place.” This surely would not have been to my taste, but the epigraph to the Encyclopédie’s first volume, from Horace—“What grace may be added to commonplace matters by the power of order and connection”—would have suited me in my childhood as it does now. Despite the evidence of sloppy dressing with which this essay began, I was, and am, tidy almost to a fault. If my sister put back one of the IHLE’s volumes in the wrong place, you could count on me to straighten things out the next time I passed the shelf.
I liked the consecutive pagination of the twenty-two volumes, perhaps for its suggestion of unity—surely as possible here on earth as it was in heaven, with the Trinity—though the multiplicity of volumes still seems essential to my idea of an encyclopedia. Today I mostly use the one‑volume Columbia Encyclopedia, and shall go on doing so as long as I have the strength to pick it up. But while it contains more words than the whole twenty-two‑volume IHLE, it’s a book in which one searches for specifics instead of sojourning; checks what one already knows rather than quests after revelation. I cannot lose the sense, when I consult it, that I’m really using the dictionary.
When I was a boy, I often daydreamed of a machine with a keyboard, into which one could type any question, and a screen, which would then display the answer. This fantasized combination of the Univac and the eight ball came to pass, of course, and one has to ask if the Web isn’t the ultimate encyclopedia, a Britannica to the max, now available even to those families who forty years ago could afford only an IHLE.
Actually, I don’t think so. The Web is too entropic and Dionysian; its links aren’t so much cross‑references as zany springboards and sinkholes. Even the IHLE, for all its lapses and silliness, had a certain authority and point of view, however Panglossian. The adventures offered on-line are less sheltered than the ones that were available to me, but the Web suggests a warp‑speed world of its own, a vortex from which one might not get home before dark. The IHLE, like “the round earth’s imagined corners,” offered the illusion of a world that might itself be miniaturized and made to sit on a shelf, just like one’s globe.
(Ah, but the things one can do on the Web. I’ve just gone searching for Albert H. Morehead, Chairman and General Editor of the National Lexicographic Board, which produced the IHLE. One would find him in no encyclopedia, but he yields eight Google matches, one of them a bibliography. Mr. Morehead’s other literary works turn out to have been almost entirely concerned with card games. So that’s why the IHLE had such an oversized canasta article.)
In an essay called “On Going Home,” Joan Didion recounts the experience of trying to clean out a drawer at her parents’ house, only to discover that “there is no final solution for letters of rejection from The Nation and teacups hand‑painted in 1900.” Nor, I must say, is there such a solution for the IHLE. I’m going to keep it, on a shelf in the little apartment I still have in New York, which has been filling up in recent years with items from the house in which I grew up: my father’s highboy and the desk I used in my old bedroom. I’ve even got there a pair of my earliest eyeglasses, which I began wearing as soon as I could get dressed without help, and which are so much a part of my sense of self that I never bothered making the transition to one invention trumpeted in the IHLE’s gently brave new world: “Scientists have invented special glasses called contact lenses. Nobody can tell that you have glasses on when you wear them.”
That’s okay; I could do without them. I got called “four eyes” only a handful of times, and to me it seemed almost a compliment, a kind of mythological doubling. The IHLE was loaded with pictures of boys my age—the Dutch one with his wooden shoes, the Greenlander in his hooded jacket, the Panamanian drinking from a coconut. Flipping through the encyclopedia as often as I did, I saw them nearly as much as some of my actual friends. If we’d ever met up, I would have let them try on my eyeglasses—through which I’d met them—as the show‑and‑tell emblem of myself. I wonder if they and the man from Zanzibar are still alive and well tonight, and whether the actual world, if not so kind a place as the IHLE claimed, has been as generous to them as it’s been to me.
