Kerre Woodham: Smells like knowledge

244 years in the making, but now it's time for a complete change. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is going solely online. Photo / Thinkstock

I was sad to hear this week that after 244 years, the Encyclopedia Britannica is to go out of print.

It was inevitable, I suppose, given the digital revolution and the wealth of resources that can be found at the touch of a key stroke. But, for me, the knowledge found in the heavy leatherette volumes has always been so satisfyingly and reassuringly authoritative.

If information was to be found between the covers of the Encyclopedia Britannica, you knew it must be true. I loved that in most homes, the volumes were kept apart from the other books, in their own bookcase, a form of intellectual apartheid.

They smelled different from other books and their paper was of a superior quality to that in novels. Encyclopedias and Bibles seemed to be cut from the same cloth. They have always been expensive and the wife of the man who brought the Encyclopedia Britannica into New Zealand told me that purchase contracts for the volumes weren't valid unless they'd been signed by husband and wife to ensure both parties were happy about the investment they were making.

Families with children were obvious customers, she said, but also older people, retirees who had the time to educate themselves.

I imagine they must have once been bright young kids who'd been forced through family circumstances to leave school at 12 and forego higher education. Once they retired, however, they had the time and the money to educate themselves in an autodidactic fashion, through the reading of the encycolpedia from start to finish.

The publishers of the Encyclopedia Britannica say they're not getting out of the business of information collation and distribution - they'll focus on their online resources, but it really is an end of an era. Where we once used to talk of clever people as having encyclopedic knowledge, future generations will talk of Googlian geniuses.