My wife cringes when she finds out I’ve been to a yard sale. I’m like an old dog that is forever dragging something home. I call them treasures. She does not.

Yesterday I brought home a set of encyclopedias. World Book encyclopedias to be specific. Not only did I purchase the set of encyclopedias, It came with yearly updates through 1969... the year I began my senior year of high school.

I was informed that no one buys encyclopedias anymore. Anything you want to know can be found on the internet. Anything. I was also informed that you can’t give them away. No one wants them. They are dinosaurs. Obsolete. “How much did you pay for them?”

“Two bucks.”

“You paid too much.”

“Think so?”

She nodded in the affirmative.

I think the whole set weighs 150 pounds. It took two trips to carry them to my car, and two more to haul them into my back garage.

When I was a child we had a set of World Books on a shelf in our den. They were among the few books my father ever bought. He said if we wanted to read the small library in town had a lot of books. He would take us there when we drove in for groceries.

That must have been a good salesman that convinced my father to spend his hard earned money on a set of encyclopedias. I can’t imagine what they cost, but am pronged to think he made payments on them.

When they were delivered each volume was individually wrapped in white tissue paper. We must have spent hours flipping through each book page by page. The whole world was in those books that sat upon that shelf in our den.

The pages with overlays fascinated me. I remember pulling F off the shelf and thumbing through until I found Frog. There it was. Splayed out on page 466 is the base of Anatomy Of A Grass Frog, beginning with the maxillary bone ending with the skin of the forelimbs and hind limbs. The following two pages were printed on clear “Transvision” sheets that contained all the frog’s innards. The aortic arches, spleen, and renal arteries. All the good stuff you can’t see from the outside of a frog.

To a nine or ten year old boy those few pages alone was worth whatever price my father had paid for the entire set.

After putting the encyclopedias out in the garage I sat there thumbing through them like I did when I was a kid. For a little while they were new again and I was ten. For two bucks I was a boy sitting in my childhood home, if not for but a few minutes. That was a bargain.

“Where are you going to put them,” she asked.

I thought for a moment. “I guess I’ll keep them out here.”

Who buys an old set of World Books nowadays? Old men. Old men and time travelers.

_______________
Rick Algood
October 6, 2019