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• 1 2015-11-30T19:41:19-08:00 Encyclopedia Britannica 6 plain 2015-12-08T10:47:19-08:00 A tower of knowledge in our living room. 1968, only three years after we came to Canada, my parents bought us the 1768-1968 200th Anniversary Set (24 Volumes), plus the three giant Merriam Webster dictionaries, one Index/Atlas, a bigger atlas with foldouts, three Perspectives volumes, and Ten pint-size volumes of Children Classic Literature (a gift) that came with it. The Cadillac of encyclopedias. Six-hundred smackaroos which they paid in instalments, that’s $4,137.93 in today’s money. Sold by a door-to-door salesman. Everything came to your door back then. Bread and milk, kitchenware, Avon, though people came to the apartment to buy Avon from my mother not to sell it. She was one of the gazillion Avon ladies. But never went door-to-door. She’s a seamstress, so women came to see her, get a dress made, as they did in Italy, and bought beauty products to go with the dress. The kitchen table was a workshop desk, a study, you name it.
   
  The 200th birthday edition apparently “had less old material in it, probably, than at any time in its history.” (Is that a good thing, I wondered?)
   
  A neighbor made a bookshelf unit for it, with an arborite finish. I looked through Volume 12 just now, first time in a very long time, Impatiens to Jinotega, a touch-me-not plant and “a large department in the central highlands of northern Nicaragua,” largely uninhabited but for "a small area in the south-western part of the department.” I was in the “I” volume for a reason, flipped through India-Pakistan, Indictment, Infamy, Infantry, Insect, Instinct, Insurance, Intelligence, Interior Decoration, Internal Combustion Engine, International Court of Justice, Interracial Relations, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Iron and Steel Industry, Isaac, Islam, Israel, Istanbul, Italy and Italian everything, Italo-Turkish war, and Italian Independence, my destination. To my surprise it does say that Garibaldi conquered Sicily from the Bourbon forces, and invaded the Neapolitan mainland, and that another Northerner, Enrico Cialdini, A Piedmontese, invaded the papal Umbria and the Marches, and joined Garibaldi’s forces in the south, and that Garibaldi (the criminal turned national hero thanks to the European press) presented his conquests to Victor Emanuel of the house of Savoy. It does say most of that. But no mention of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of southerners, or Fenestrelle, one of the first concentration camps in modern times, in northern Italy where southern men vanished, now restored and beautified. And I think of the 110 Nobel Prize winners and five American Presidents who have contributed their knowledge to Britannica. While my son shows me his drawing of a cruel ruler who enjoyed surveying his kingdom, and seeing his tiny, puny subjects suffer. Avon calling.
   
  See video (Avon Calling)    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0ZaiIAVCto