From the Academy

Encyclopedias

One of the principal instruments of education remains the encyclopedia, even though encyclopedia-distributing in America is a pressure-sales affair and most sets are sold to confused parents on the pretext that their children will want to study them. (The children ordinarily don’t, because the parents themselves never open the volumes once they have made the down-payment.) As with most other aspects of education in this country, we have mass-produced and mass-distributed with slight attention to quality. Some of our encyclopedias are mere shams, so much sawdust.