Death of the Encyclopaedia SALESMAN

A few decades ago, if you paid a visit to a home with a modicum of house pride, you would unfailingly have found an entire line of leather-bound volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) in their bookshelves.

- SURESH SUBRAHMANYAN

They would stand tall and proud alongside the Complete Works of Shakespeare, the Bhagavad Gita, The Oxford English Dictionary and possibly jostle, some Sherlock Holmes mysteries and for light entertainment, half a dozen of P.G. Wodehouse's best and brightest.

In my living memory, I do not recall ever having taken out a single volume of the EB series to bone up on the exact dimensions of the tallest mountain peak in the world, the deepest ocean bed, the biggest star in the firmament, or the most poisonous, carnivorous plant in the Amazon jungles. These are very small samples of the enormous amounts of minutiae contained in the alphabetically arranged EB. Come to think of it, I cannot recall an occasion when my father, a professional banker, slid out an EB tome to satisfy his curiosity on the question of which was the first bank in the world to go kaput and leave its customers tragically insolvent. The only time these volumes were ever taken out of their parking slots, very carefully by my mother, was to blow the dust off the covers.