BROUGHT TO BOOK

Once, and in a no-doubt desperate attempt to curb my moaning that, 'I haven't got anything to do.' Or perhaps to placate me during one of my frequent bouts of croup. I cannot remember which. Anyway, my father gave me his set of encyclopedias. Straight off the shelf, as it were. I promptly spread all nine volumes over the carpet in our 'front' room, and was immediately engrossed, and an hour or so later had to be called to come and get my tea. Thus his manoeuvre worked, a brilliant fatherly response to what must have been a tiresome situation. Only later did I realise that the encyclopedias were very close to my father's heart, and that he had given away something he held precious and perhaps irreplaceable.   
Over sixty years later I still have them, for the red-bound set has followed me from south Lincolnshire to Norfolk, and within Norfolk, from Norwich to Wicklewood to Wymondham and latterly to Sheringham, where they still fill eighteen and a half inches of shelf space.
Of course, any self-respecting second hand bookshop has a set of encyclopedia available for sale - just as they will have a set of Dickens, or the plays of Shakespeare - but they are not a currently popular choice. In fact, and from a bookshop perspective, they must be quite hard to shift as they are, of course, usually out-of-date.
My set, the set my father gave me, rejoices under the umbrella title of Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopedia, published by The Amalgamated Press Ltd. They are, no doubt, also out-of-date, and I am sure most of the entries are available online. But I love them, still look at them, and quite regularly use them.
I am not certain how my father acquired them, but there was a family story that, as a young man, he had painstakingly purchased the volumes, section by section, and then had them bound. If so, they must have been cheap, because in his early years he worked in a Cotswolds' woollen mill and then as a junior clerk in a legal firm, and money was not easily available.
Nor am I certain exactly when he acquired them, and the publications are not dated. According to the series introduction in Volume One (A to Ban, 896 pages, including an essay by John Galsworthy), work on compiling the set actually began in 1915, which means they were most probably published early in the 1920s, after the First World War. This chimes nicely with the family chronology. My father would have collected them either just before he left the Cotswolds to move to south Lincolnshire, or just after he arrived in Long Sutton. Either way, they are a significant symbol of his determination to educate himself.
Today, of course, if you wanted an explanation of nuclear fusion or an appraisal of the current economy of Cuba, or even background facts about Nelson Mandela, then you wouldn't reach for these work-tired and dog-eared volumes. You would look online. But if you wanted information about the First World War, then my goodness, it is here in fulsome abundance. The timing of publication, in that sense, was perfect, and the writing is surprisingly objective.
The Harmsworth nine are still the first volumes I turn to if I'm looking for facts relating to any subject prior to, shall we say, 1925. They also contain not only my father's fluently-written signature, but also mine, in an awkward juvenile scrawl.