Old encyclopedia

Growing up we had two encyclopedia sets: one the Britannica (14'th), and the other the Book of Knowledge, which aimed at a younger readership with a wildly different approach. The Britannica had all entries alphabetical, as you'd expect.

The older (not the New, which turned strictly alphabetical too) tried to entice the reader to read on into different topics. If you wanted all the articles on some topic (or summaries of all of the stories by e.g. Shakespeare) you looked in the index and perhaps had to get several volumes off the shelf. It was designed for browsing.

There was a Canadian version also, with some of the articles and stories in French.

On facing pages (5246 and 5247) of the 1912 edition linked above you find "Simple Simon Met a Pieman" and a philosophical essay "Must all Things End?" and a few pages later "The Marvels of Electricity and Magnetism." The latter article knows nothing of the nucleus, attempts to prove the existence of the ether, and includes a howler "Why the Earth's pull is believed to be caused by electricity."

I don't recall anything quite that egregious from the edition we had, which I think was from the late 50's. For me, their organization plan worked. I browsed, jumping around to things that seemed interesting at whatever age I was at the time. When I was too old for the little kid's summaries of great stories, I was old enough to read about rockets and explosives. And eventually I started browsing in the Britannica too.

My parents also got the Great Books set and its associated teaching guide, but never got around to actually trying to teach out of them, though we kids read here and there in the Great Books. (horrible font, btw) I inherited both, and we never got around to using the teaching guide with our kids either.