Bookmark: A child's books of wonder

My mother — who generally found ways to resist almost any expense on the grounds that it was a luxury ("there's no need" was her default argument) — thought that buying new books was inexcusably indulgent. Yet, when I was 11 or 12 and growing up in South St. Paul in the 1960s, she put aside her resistance long enough to provide her children with a full set of "The Golden Book Encyclopedia."

Sold at Applebaum's grocery in 16 sequential volumes, the encyclopedias were different from the few other books in our house, most of which dealt with some half-forgotten interest of my father's: lettering (he'd been a commercial artist), or shortwave radio (he'd been a radioman in the service). As the first page announced, they were "Fact-filled Volumes Dramatically Illustrated With More Than 6,000 Pictures. The Only Encyclopedia for Young Grade-school children. Accurate and Authoritative. Entertainingly written and illustrated to make learning an adventure."

From the minute Mom put Volume One (Aardvark to Army) into the shopping cart, I was hooked.

It was one of the greatest investments she ever made, far more nourishing than the Sugar Pops and Frosted Flakes that filled the rest of her cart. I read in the encyclopedias by the hour. I do recall doubting their accuracy when the entry on China — it would have been in Chalk to Czechoslovakia — declared that one in four people in the world was Chinese. I came downstairs and told my mother the book had to be wrong: I didn't know anybody who was Chinese. She explained that our town was not the same as the rest of the world, which may be as valuable a lesson as anyone can learn.

The encyclopedias told a few enticing stories, like the boys stumbling into the art-filled caves at Lascaux (things like that just didn't happen in Minnesota), or the Mexican peasant who plowed up a volcano (the first entry in Volume 12, Paricutin to Quicksand). But they delivered countless things I never knew before. Maybe there was something apt in that 12th volume's title: books that started with an eruption (of data) and became a morass that, once you fell into it, was hard to escape: facts for fact's sake, a realm in which no information was useless.

I still recall an episode of the TV show "Car 54, Where Are You?" in which patrolman Gunther Toody sets out on a self-improvement program that involves reading the encyclopedia start to finish. He keeps trying to show off his newfound knowledge. "Is that a dog?" he asks his partner. "I thought it might be an aardvark, an African mammal of the anteater family." Toody and I were on the same wavelength.

Trivia — knowledge abstracted from context — turned into an industry over the course of the 20th century, fueling crossword puzzles in the 1920s, the quiz shows of radio and early TV, the Trivial Pursuit sensation, the pub quizzes in countless barrooms. This might be one of the few ways in which I feel totally at home in my century, and I have to thank my mother for splurging on "The Golden Book Encyclopedia." For a budding trivia buff they were, as Melville said of a whaling ship, my Harvard and my Yale.

Jim Rogers is an essayist and poet in St. Paul. jsrminn@gmail.com