No, that would be bollocks.
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Is Funk and Wagnall’s the one with the Famous Stories synopsis in the back. I remember a lot of Shakespeare and other authors. I loved having those for book reports.
There is a very old copy of EB available on tpb. I believe it is in the public domain and I keep a copy on my ipad. Not extremely useful but I have legitimately looked things up in it at least once and have probably explored it 5 or 6 times.
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I was at my local public library this afternoon and that was the exact edition they had up on the shelf!
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Because enceclopedias are cool, that’s why.
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Growing up, we had an older set of the Universal Standard Encyclopedia as well as a newer set of the World Book Encyclopedia. One of my sisters used to set them up on end on the floor to make chain reactions (like dominoes). Woe to the person who caused them to fall before she was ready!
And yes, I did read the encyclopedias for fun, just like many others here 
Years later I would regularly read the dictionary on my lunch hour at work
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One summer Sunday morning… turning the corner to the family room…
My sister and I (Ages 13 and 16): “YOU GOT BRITTANICA!!!” 
Dad: “Yeah, we dropped in at a yard sale, saw them. The guy said that his kids hadn’t touched them, and we could have the set for $50.”
Dad: “We handed him the $50 and peeled out of there as fast as we could.”
The set was only 2 or 3 years old, and indeed, barely opened.
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My parents couldn’t afford an enciclopédia like Britannica or Barsa. But as my father believed knowledge and hard work was very important, He managed to give us books like these ones:
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Personal anecdote…
My stepmom and her sister both tied for (I think) state-level in Florida for the lead-up to the National Spelling Bee back in the 60s. They won a set of Encyclopaedia Brittanica with some very nice binding that had a place in our dad’s study well into the 80s.
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I would be sad for the time when my dad’s Britannica and Hispanica sets will need to be cleared out. I would kind of want to give them to an artist to make something cool out of them so that they live on in some way instead of being potentially trashed.
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Presumably there would be a prohibitive cost in formatting but this makes me wonder how much it would cost to do an on demand printing of one of the online encyclopedias.
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We had those, too. I think Time-Life had some other sets with stuff like science and maybe history, too.
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We had the Time-Life Science Library series. I still remember reading the section on relativity in the ‘Time’ volume, illustrated with drawings of (IIRC) spies traveling on trains.
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I remember one page in the Nature Library book ‘The Birds’ which had some sort of Mayan headdress made of feathers, it scared the crap out of me as a young kid.
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