Acetate Pages

I was reading my daughter a story the other night called Castles.  It's a little kid book with some acetate pages- you know, those clear plastic pages?  You can flip them back and forth and there's new images underneath.  It's a book that I got late in my childhood and I kept all these years.  I tried looking for it online, but it seems that it, like so many books, is out of print.

It dawned on me, while I was helping my daughter flip the acetate pages back and forth, that the era of the encyclopedia ended.

It's sad, really, because it the encyclopedia died quietly- just slipped away.

When I was a kid, I remember the World Book salesman coming to the door and trying to sell my parents on getting the set for my sister and I.  They used to sell the full set and partial sets.  Really. You could buy some of the common letters and not have to buy the XYZ book and so on.

I remember getting pretty excited about the idea and trying to talk my mom into getting them.  I think I would have been in 4th or 5th grade, so perhaps 9 or 10 years old. I kept talking about how nice it would be to get the set and we wouldn't have to go to the library that was so far away- and it's moldy in there, you know? And the school only has one set that's really old....

And, yes, we got them.  I think that the set was something like $900, which was a small fortune in the 80s.  I remember cracking open the pages and looking through them for the first time.  All those pretty colored pictures!

But when I opened the A and looked for the Anatomy pages, I was disappointed.

There were no acetate pages for the anatomical man.  

My dad has a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas and IT had the acetate pages.  It was the only colored pictures in the whole set, but it sure was neat!  Turning those seven different pages to reveal the next anatomical system underneath.

So, while I'm sitting with my daughter naming things on the page that she's pointing to (portcullis, portcullis, portcullis....she likes to make me repeat a bunch), I realized that she'll never get to have that experience with the acetate anatomy pages.  

It made me quite sad.  It's not just something that was neat to play with- it was a cultural thing.  EVERYONE of my generation or older knows about those acetate pages in the Encyclopedia Britannica.  I tried Googling to find an image of the old pages, but all that shows up in the top searches is the modern on-line encyclopedia pages.  It's especially sad because I think that those pages helped direct me to biology- there's just something about being able to interact with a physical object that piques curiosity...something the internet will never provide.