Fred's Book Club: Everything, Useless.

Last week we had my smallest book; this week, the biggest series.

This Wednesday's episode of the Humpback Writers (named for the fact that it runs on Wednesday, not because of the condition kyphosis, "the third basic type of spinal curvature... In its most severe form, kyphosis becomes a sharp angular deformity known as hunchback") features thousands of writers, because of the nature of the book, or really books. Thirty books. Maybe some of the writers did suffer from kyphosis. How should I know?

Here is the set in question:

Yes, fellow kids, it is the thirty-volume set of the Encyclopedia Americana! No, not the one moms bought one volume a week from the A&P; I think that was the World Book (still around) or Funk & Wagnalls (not). I don't wish to put down those encyclopedias, but the Americana (first published in 1829) was a serious general reference set, the kind of thing found in colleges, high schools, libraries, and the offices of educational publishers.

Alas, here's the rub:

This is the 1985 edition. I have a thirty-volume library-bound encyclopedia that is thirty-five years old, and thus terribly out of date.

What the heck am I doing with an encyclopedia, let alone one this old? Did Fred's mommy, sensing the genius of her boy, buy it in installments to help his advanced learning? Did she buy it as a Hail Mary to try to get some information through his thick skull? Did I win it on The Price Is Right? Did I shoplift it from Walden Books using unusually large pants?

No -- what happened was, one of my first jobs when I was a little baby editor Fred, was as a clerk/mail reader/Dude Friday/dogsbody/research assistant/flunky/water cooler refiller/occasional proofreader for a publisher of nonfiction books for youths. The Internet was little more than a twinkle in DARPA's eye at the time, so it was helpful to have things like a big, serious, unabridged dictionary and a big, serious encyclopedia. I worked at this place for a year or so, and then we heard that the company had been bought and the office was moving out of the city. So, everything had to go, including us. We had jobs for a while, mainly packing down decades of stuff, resolving author and production contracts, all that kind of thing. And no one wanted the encyclopedia. It was just going to be tossed. So, although it was dated even then, I decided to bring it home to my apartment, one volume at a time. There's a lot of information in 23,000 pages of six-point type. At the time, I don't think it could have all fit on a CD-ROM; Microsoft's Encarta had been around a bit, but was not nearly as extensive an encyclopedia. I didn't have a computer at the time, anyway.

The Americana was useful for a while, especially when I was unemployed and scrambling for publishing work. I didn't get many fact-checking assignments then, but I did have some copyedit jobs, and sometimes you want to look things up to make sure they're right. Well, we still had no Internet, children, although that was coming soon. And then we did, and I stopped using the books.

(Remember, wee tots, the Internet is only a source, and as a whole not a reliable source, of information; we all need to learn how to pick out the good stuff from the mountains of crap and fake news. And just because I've linked to Wikipedia in this article doesn't mean I endorse it; it's free and I'm lazy.)

These last few years, the main use of the volumes has been propping up electric candles in the window for Christmas. And, as I have tons of other books that can be used for that, I have to let them go. They take up a lot of space.

And they are out of date. In these tomes, Burma is still Burma, not Myanmar, and George Herbert Walker Bush is still alive, and is known as the vice president of the United States (Volume 5, BURMA to CATHAY). Not only is Yugoslavia still intact (Volume 29, WILMOT PROVISO to ZYGOTE) but so is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Volume 27, TRANCE to VENIAL SIN). Persons who have become awfully important in the decades since, like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, George Walker Bush, Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, Osama Bin Laden, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, all of them were alive in 1985, but none of them rated an entry back then.

You can imagine how antiquated the entries on science and technology are. Just a quick example, about Saturn, quoted from Volume 24 (RUSSIA to SKIMMER): "A total of 21-23 moons are known to be in orbit around Saturn." We now know that Saturn has more moons than any other planet in our Solar System: "A team discovered a haul of 20 new moons orbiting the ringed planet, bringing its total to 82; Jupiter, by contrast, has 79 natural satellites," the BBC reported last October.

It's true that some things don't go out of date like that. The quote on kyphosis at the top of this entry is still accurate, and its brief section on treatment for the condition hasn't aged significantly. But even historic information is liable to change. For example, when these books came out, no one knew where Richard III was buried; his body was located in 2012.

The publisher, Grolier (since become a division of Scholastic), only publishes online editions of its encyclopedias now. I'm sure if you've been in a library in the last decade or so you've seen how much of its information services have been relegated to computers. The last print edition of the Americana was published in 2006. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica no longer makes a hard copy version of its encyclopedia. A full set of a hardcover encyclopedia is pretty rare these days.

And I have to get rid of it.

You can't sell these things. I've seen people try online, but shipping would cost more than you could get. Each book weighs about 3.3 pounds; it's close to 100 pounds altogether. It could go book rate, or what the post office now calls Media Mail, for $2.80 a pound, but who wants it that much, that they'd pay $280 just for the shipping?

Libraries don't want 35-year-old reference books. Nobody wants research that will lead them wrong -- well, I guess some of us do, judging by the misinformation online, but they won't bother to haul out the hundred pounds of books just to confirm their biases. No, old encyclopedias are of interest only to historians, and mainly important encyclopedias like the famous 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

You can't recycle hardcover books here (not that our recycling program is anything but a state-law-mandated charade anyway).

I despise sending good books to the trash heap, but I have to start reducing clutter. So, I've started throwing the Americana out, three volumes at a time, six books a week, for an extra ten concentrated pointy-cornered pounds in each load. Surely throwing the very books I'm writing about into the landfill makes this is the saddest entry in the Humpback Writers series.

Also, one reason why I tip the garbage men at Christmas.

Farewell, encyclopedia! Your scholarly words are too good, or just too old, for this world.