A New Survey Of Universal Knowledge

For those of you who give a stuff, here is my explanation of this year's OG advent calendar. You might recall that I am rather proud of our complete edition (24 volumes plus a two volume dictionary) of the 1959 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Books do furnish a room. I am even more chuffed that we paid the princely sum of £1 for the whole lot - admittedly I had to drive (I think it was somewhere in Essex) to collect them but a bargain nonetheless.

1959 is quite an apt date for this survey of knowledge. I was born in 1960 so the handsome red-bound edition is a nice approximation of the state of knowledge at the date of my birth. Gagarin had not yet been launched into space; within my first decade man would walk on the moon; the microchip would ventually revolutionise life in unforeseeable ways. It has been quite a ride.

 

  

 

The Overgraduate may be vain (after all, like a preening boxer, he refers to himself in the third person) but he will not pretend to a new survey of universal knowledge (the proclamation fronting each volume of Britannica), rather there will be a partial and digressive dip into page 63 of each of the twenty-four volumes of that 1959 edition. The reason for the number 63 will be disclosed only at entry number 24. If you too have a 1959 edition you might be able to anticipate what is to come. Hopefully you will be wrong!