[HN Gopher] An old Encyclopaedia Britannica is a work to cherish
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       An old Encyclopaedia Britannica is a work to cherish
        
       Author : pseudolus
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2022-10-01 12:45 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.spectator.co.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.spectator.co.uk)
        
       | nkurz wrote:
       | https://archive.ph/xYxbL
        
       | drgoodvibe wrote:
       | I'm fortunate enough to have a an entire set from 1989 that my
       | father bought for me and my older sister. I refuse to get rid of
       | it. At the moment the set is in my old bedroom in my parents
       | house but one day I intend to feature it prominently in my
       | library.. it's funny how one can get attached like that.
        
         | turtleyacht wrote:
         | The Great Books are a treasure in and of themselves. The
         | Syntopicon--now there's two volumes I'd like to see on Internet
         | Archive.
        
         | I_complete_me wrote:
         | Would you be kind enough to check if that version contains
         | anything on calculating the length of the perimeter of an
         | ellipse. Backstory, I was living in London in 1990 and this guy
         | was trying to sell me & girlfriend a set of the E.B. I asked
         | him to show me the article on the length of the perimeter of an
         | ellipse and he ... well, he didn't. Later I discovered that it
         | is a very tricky matter. But I wonder if there is anything in
         | that version that mentions the difficulty.
        
       | ben30 wrote:
       | My grandfather was born in 1906, I remember reading through a
       | very old encyclopaedia that he had had when young. At the time I
       | found it amusing that the map of the South Pole looked like a
       | rough sketch lacking in any detail.
        
       | AlbertCory wrote:
       | Indeed. I think it's always interesting to read what people
       | thought _then_ , without benefit of hindsight. If you want to
       | dismiss it based on what we now know, I'll just ask, "What things
       | do you believe today that will be embarrassing in 40 years?"
        
         | yucky wrote:
         | >"What things do you believe today that will be embarrassing in
         | 40 years?"
         | 
         | Yeah, I wish this were a pop-up modal on every site, before
         | anybody can hit submit.
        
       | 5555624 wrote:
       | I've got the 13th edition (1926). What's great about the older
       | editions is discovering that "real" experts contributed to the
       | encyclopaedia. (For example, Albert Einstein writing about Space-
       | Time, Sigmund Freud writing about the Freudian School of
       | Psychoanalysis.)
        
         | nateburke wrote:
         | I grew up with a 1943 edition of encyclopedia Britannica in the
         | house. I can remember looking at the maps volume and seeing no
         | highways in the United States, only railroads.
         | 
         | It also included an EXHAUSTIVE article about Mormons that I
         | used for a school paper one time.
         | 
         | You could really tell that the authors of the articles CARED.
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-01 23:01 UTC)