Children's encyclopedias

When I was little we had Harwyn's THE ART LINKLETTER PICTURE ENCYCLOPEDIA FOR BOYS AND GIRLS, originally published in 1961.  I read somewhere online that many of the artists who illustrated it also worked on EC's notorious horror comics.  I remember being creeped out by the picture of Macbeth gleefully preparing to knife the king, and I guess that had an EC sensibility.

We also had Bobley's ILLUSTRATED WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA.  The entry on communism is a McCarthyite classic.  Under the sub-heading "What makes people communists?" it says "In democratic nations, a communist is often a person with a sort of mental illness..." The item about rivers says "They can be damned [sic]..." (Was that REALLY a typo?) This edition had a last-minute addendum about the just-elected Richard Nixon.

And we had a 1930s edition of the British encyclopedia THE WORLD BOOK. (The entry on flags showed the Third Reich's swastika flag.) It had a special volume focusing on the British Empire's dominions.  It was an incomplete set:  the volume covering Irw to Mis somehow got misplaced.  It had a last-minute addendum about the new king George VI.

And then there's THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE.  That started out being published in Britain around 1910 with the title CHILDREN'S ENCYCLOPEDIA, and Grolier published it in the US with its new title.  THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE has gone through many revised versions, but we had the first Canadian edition from the 1920s, substantially the same as the original British version, though it added some stuff about World War I and some specifically Canadian items. (I think there was a photo of Moncton, the city we lived closest to.) Mother's family bought it when she was a little girl.

THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE in its early versions had an earnestly didactic style, not quite as manipulative as more recent counterparts.  It was a 20-volume set, divided into lots of categories like "The Book of the Earth," "The Book of Things to Make and Do," and "The Story of Famous Books." "The Book of Wonder" had the "Wise Man" answering questions like "Did any of the Apostles visit Britain?" and "Will the last man die gasping for air?" a question characteristic of the time. "The Book of Life" had a section called "Alcohol, the enemy of life." (This was the age of Prohibition, of course.) And it had a lot of children's stories with some remarkable illustrations:  I think Sir Arthur Rackham worked on it.