The feel of paper

After 244 years, as the world bids farewell to the print version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, how many of us will shed a tear for it?

Many of our generation, I am sure, will mourn.

We were not eager researchers. We didn't seek knowledge to help us earn better marks or complete projects that brought a sparkle to the teacher's eye and a pat on the back for us. We didn't want to change the world with what we learnt. We just loved the feel of paper, the thrill of turning pages and discovering something new. And so we would head straight to the numerous volumes of the encyclopaedia whenever we got a chance, do a kind of eenie-meenie-miney-mo and pick one — and that was our entertainment channel for the next couple of hours.

We didn't go armed with notebooks and pens to educate ourselves. We took down nothing for later regurgitation in our schoolwork. What we read, the illustrations and pictures we pored over, most of that valuable information our elders thought we were getting would probably be forgotten as soon as the page was crossed, but the elation we experienced in those moments of wonder would continue long beyond the time we were immersed in the book.

When library period was over, we would return V-W or N-M (or whichever volume it was) to the shelf and we would trudge back to class, reliving the thrills and chills, depending on what words had come our way as we had moved through.

Our school textbooks, although lighter to carry around and with larger, user-friendly print, were not as attractive as those heavy tomes we had just replaced in the cupboard for someone else to explore next. That was when greed was born, I think. We wanted an exclusive right to the encyclopaedia — to be able to consult it at any time of the day or night, whether we needed to know or not. We wanted to leave it on the bedside table or right there on the bed with a bookmark to indicate the place where we had fallen asleep, and we wanted to be free to go back to it at any time.

Crackling pages

Of course, that didn't happen in our childhood or in adulthood or when our children were growing up. Owning a multi-volume encyclopaedia was just beyond our budget.

We could only slaver and slobber mentally when presented with instalment plans and supposedly easy-buy options, agonise over them from every angle for weeks on end to find a way to make them affordable - and then finally shake our heads in denial. Turning those crackling pages in our own home was not meant to be. But we soon found a sustainable way of getting the information from those pages — the CD-ROM. Cheap enough that our son could save up his pocket money and finance his own while the befuddled parents still hankered for those leather-bound volumes that could be flipped open without the complication of a computer and a password. "This is so much easier, neater, quicker..." he said - but we were not convinced, and in all the years that the CD has been lying with us, we have probably only gone to it once - when the ‘demo' was being given and it was open for us to ‘flip' through!

Then out of the blue, a senior citizen who was downsizing her house and offloading books by the bushel, made me an offer that couldn't be refused — and now I am the proud and possessive owner of my own encyclopaedia — out-of-date, no doubt, but still with pages I can turn, textures I can feel, and information I can absorb!

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.