How Dreadfully Common

In high school, the librarian once spoke to our class and gave us some real talk about encyclopedias. We were doing encyclopedias wrong, she said. Our parents were content buying us trash encyclopedias, she sniffed, but anybody who knew anything about reference books knew that the only way to go were with the Gale Encyclopedias.

 

“Gale,” the librarian intoned with the haughtiness and authority of a daguerreotype of Queen Victoria. She seemed to have a special antipathy for the hoi polloi who were content to wallow in the mud with passe reference books like World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica. Only Gale revealed the world’s true face, its breadth and depth of topics. World capitals. Phyla. Nobel Prize winners. Laws of thermodynamics. The whole thing.

 

Oh, how she must have looked down her nose at us high schoolers. I can just hear the librarian in her late-‘80s back office in the library, chain smoking while on the phone with an equally erudite friend: “These kids and their families actually still use World Book,” she chortles. “I mean, can you imagine? ‘Volume 1: A.’ How dreadfully common.”

 

You know, they say the Velvet Underground’s debut album actually sold very few copies but that everybody who bought a copy started their own band, which confirmed how influential the band was. I wonder how influential this librarian was—how many of us in this small group of high school students had their minds blown by her words about encyclopedias and let that guide us through the next 30 years of assessing the viability of reference materials.