Fount of all Knowledge

Today

I still couldn't get that blasted ball right so in the end I typed into my Google search bar "how many pentagons to make a ball". Immediately I was directed to a craft website which told me that I need twelve and gave instructions for putting it together. Simples!

"We certainly used to be able to find things out before the Internet," I wrote to Beatrice "but it was more laborious and we probably often gave up."

In My day

When I was a child, finding things out generally involved looking in books. You asked your parents, of course, and your vastly more knowledgeable older brothers. Books of reference were found in libraries, both public and at school. I once received a dictionary after writing a prize-winning essay for the local paper and I was very pleased to get it. It not only had the usual A-Z of words; it had world maps, flags and other generally interesting facts.

We also had shelves of reference books at home. A Chambers dictionary, French, German and Latin dictionaries and a twelve volume encyclopedia. We had a medical dictionary that I would read for fun because it described so many weird illnesses, sometimes with gruesome photographs. I sympathised with that character in "Three Men in a Boat" who decided, after reading the medical dictionary, that he had every illness except housemaid's knee. We had a music dictionary and, another favourite a two-volume book entitled "People of all Nations" which depicted unashamedly colonial photographs of indigenous peoples from all over the world. Daddy had collected this in weekly instalments, then had the lot bound. My fascinated eyes would look at a picture of a woman from, say, Papua, new Guinea, dressed only in a tattered skirt and grinning toothlessly at the camera, and captioned "This dusky beauty....". I still have this publication.

I don't think we worried much about the ever changing nature of knowledge; that we are constantly finding out more and understanding both past and present in different ways.

This was nowhere more evident than in the one book which outshone all others in its compactness and range of information. Its only drawback was that it was in German. One of the few books that Mamma had brought with her was the "Knauer" - at least that's how I think it was spelt, I only ever heard Mamma say the word. If we just couldn't find out what we wanted to know Mamma would get out this extraordinarily packed book. The typeface was tiny and the paper was thin so as to accommodate more facts; there were illustrations and photographs and maps. There seemed to be nothing that the Knauer didn't know and it was with something of a thrill that I would watch while Mamma said "Let's see what the Knauer says", and then go unerringly to the right spot.

Do you know I just typed "Knauer" and "Knauer Encyclopedia" into Google and came up with nothing. Maybe that's poetic justice.