World Book

Today I got a Macbook.
It’s amazingly functional, aesthetically elegant and very practical. I’m desperately anticipating using it tomorrow, and it’ll play an invaluable role in my life at uni. It’s also roughly the same size and weight as volume “H” in my grandparent’s 1969 World Book Encyclopaedia.

My grandparents proudly bought the World Book Encyclopaedia through the mail from the U.S, volume by volume, to help their children, including Mum, have a better education. At the time it was a huge expense that they worked hard to pay for in monthly installments. The much-leafed through pages are full of labelled bookmarks and tiny notes for twenty or so years worth of school projects, written very gently in pencil so they could be carefully erased. The World Book (short of the library) was an unparalleled bastion of accessible knowledge, a well of global wisdom, and most amazingly of all, it was sitting in their lounge room.

It’s still sitting there, in the same beautifully made shelf. Pa still occasionally looks something up in the beige, gilt-edged volumes. For Grandma, they are still a fantastic source of information and an invaluable crossword tool. They’re old, americentric, and full of black and white pictures of people with bad hair cuts, but I’ve always found them to be beautiful books. When I younger and visiting, I would sometimes sit in their lounge room and read the World Book, particularly fascinated by the entries at the start of each volume about the letters themselves (“A” is the first letter of the Roman Alphabet. It’s origins have been traced from the pictogram for “ox” in the proto-semetic alphabet.)

About seven or eight years ago we met up with Grandma and Pa at a local primary school fate, my grandma offered to buy me a 1973 World Book that was there at the book stall because I’d always been so fascinated by theirs. All thirty volumes were on the ground, in a big, torn cardboard box. “$10” was scribbled on the front in permanent marker. The lady gave them to us for five.

My macbook pro, the lowest model in it’s range, now charging for the first time in the kitchen could contain an entire-single floor library, every major classic novel in the english canon or the 1979 world book encyclopedia more than five hundred times over. As soon as I get one of those wireless usb modems, I’ll have in my hands something with access to the majority of human knowledge, a hub of the thoughts of entire nations, direct communication with more than a billion people, the “collective conscious”.

I’ve looked at my second-hand 1973 World Book a couple of times, and even boldly attempted to get away with referencing a 40-year old encyclopaedia in a history essay in year ten, but it’s not the same. I know it's worthlessness. Last year, I had to talk Mum out of throwing it away and drag the untouched tomes into a dusty cupboard.

We are accelerating at such a rate that we ride the relentless momentum of technology without any comprehension of just how radically the world is changing, and what this means. We are in the midst of the biggest shift that has ever happened in humanity’s history. It’s exciting, it’s terrifying, it’s wonderful, it’s overwhelming, it’s exhilarating and it’s completely awe-inspiring. And sometimes, like when I look at the volumes of the World Book Encyclopaedia, arranged alphabetically on the home-crafted shelf at my grandparent’s house, it’s touched with a little bit of sadness.