Like several other earlier comments I read the hell out of Childcraft when I was a yout. It was my introduction to Edwin A. Abbott and Norton Juster among many other things. It is long out of print and the set I read back in the day is long gone, but as soon as I had kids I bought a copy off ebay. They read it as much as I did.
Used is also a good way to get your hands on a hard copy of the encyclopedia if you don’t mind the info being a bit dated. Much cheaper than buying brand-new like Benj Edwards did. Although the information is generally easily available online now, I prefer the kids be reading a bound book… they get plenty of screen time already.
This is the link to the article. You can see at the bottom of the header image that Edwards has an 80s edition of Childcraft too.
We’ve got pre- and post-WW2 copies of Harmsworth’s Encyclopedia. The Harmsworths are the arseholes behind the Daily Heil, so they are probably skewing to the right even more than other encyclopedias from the period. The pre-war books are full of glowing praise for the Fascists. Quelle surprise.
I hated writing term papers in high school. It was hard to not just copy the darn encyclopedia and get back to my booze and bag of weed. I hated writing the bibliography at the end because I would have a good buzz going and couldn’t read my notes and it was due in the morning.
And what? It has to be typed? Great, now I have to book time in the typing room.
@YankInNewZealand that’s the same set we had when I was growing up. We also had to carry around one of those old hardcover red dictionaries, we were taught and tested on how to use them. Alphabetizing lists of words after finding the definitions, it’s no wonder I turned to alcohol at a young age.
One thing to add about our World Book set, we had it in the west of Ireland and the set was very US-centric. It had amazing spreads about each state but very little about my homeland. I may not have been able to look up anything about Niamh Cinn-Óir but I could probably tell you how many bushels of alfalfa were grown in Alabama in 1979.
I have a vague recollection of getting in trouble for plagiarizing an article, and being caught because I used the american spelling of a word I didn’t know.
some years ago before a certain library was closed and moved to a new building a lot of books were disposed of in various ways…
one item I remember was the columbia lippincott which was an interesting publication giving thought provocative considerations on places around the world
Agreed, this worries me more and more. We’re already seeing it. In the past few weeks, more than once I have googled some basic technical topic looking for straight-up information. It used to be that Wikipedia would always be the top hit on such plain “I need information” queries. Nowadays Wikipedia will be the fifth or sixth entry. Above that and below the paid links were all articles on sites I’d never heard of. The articles seemed to have a lot of information, but the writing style was slightly odd. Repeated facts in adjacent sentences, inconsistent grammar, stilted word choices, etc. Took me a moment to realize these were all AI-generated and thus nothing in them could be trusted to be accurate. Sigh.
I recall that when my g’grandfather passed when I was about 4, he didn’t have a lot of money behind, but he specifically left $400 (or whatever it was) for us kids to have an encyclopedia – so my folks got us a 1976 World Book. I still remember the day it was delivered to our house. I read that thing all the time. I took those volumes into my bed and read the under the covers. (Very big fan on the volume for “P” - Planet - and “So-Sz” - Space Exploration). My love (and probably my talent) for just collecting information stemmed from having that around the house. So thanks G’Grandpa!
One of my earliest memories was getting marked down for spelling an intermediate shade between black and white as “grey”. The teacher wanted “gray”, but my crayolas told me otherwise.
We got marked down in no uncertain terms if we ever used the American spelling of something. To this day I put ‘U’s in places they proubably doun’t beloung, just in case.
I just assumed Canada used the same spelling as 'Murica. I’ll keep that in mind should I ever need to have my neighbour pick up some colourful aluminium products from Canada.
We’re a mix. Most spelling is British, but ironically not aluminum, your chosen example. We also use the American vocabulary for the most part (truck not lorry, elevator not lift, etc).
To this day I put ‘U’s in places they proubably doun’t beloung, just in case. 
