Conceding

You may have seen the obit last month on the Encyclopedia Britannica, the printed edition. How sad the passing. Over the past two and a half centuries, it has satisfied many curious minds and finished the quest for diligent students on fact finding missions. Now it has gone the way of the dinosaur, the dodo, and Collier's Encyclopedia, which happened to be the set in my childhood home. How I loved to read and read about the world in the slick pages of those books. But in the twenty-first century I haven't looked up so much as a biography in an encyclopedic missive, and I suppose most of us haven't. In spite of the often aggravating "side effects" of the electronic word, we seem to rely on it almost exclusively, rejecting the need for the big, knowledge filled books. May the grand old Encyclopedia Britannica rest in peace knowing it served humanity well.