The red tomes still perched on the bookshelf at his parents’ house took Kurt Sansone on a trip down memory lane to when the internet did not exist. He uploaded a photo to Facebook and the response was an eye opener.

If you were born after the 1990s the internet seems to have existed forever but this marvellous invention is only 25 years old.

To be exact, the 25th birthday celebrated last week represented the first time the public gained access to the World Wide Web, designed and deployed by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland.

Since then, the internet as we know it took off spectacularly and today represents a virtual frontier of human interaction and a source of infinite information.

And if you are wondering what Cisgender*, referred to by Civil Liberties Minister Helena Dalli in her opinion piece on page 17 means, you could always google it – whether you are in the comfort of your home or reading this at the beach.

But roll backward three decades and looking up a word very often depended on a search in the red encyclopaedia sitting on the living room shelf.

“No home was complete without one,” commented blogger Josanne Cassar underneath a photo of the 14 volumes of the New Standard Encyclopaedia I uploaded to Facebook as a flashback of my childhood.

They still sit on the shelf, pages still crisp, but with content that is largely outdated – the West African country of Benin is called Dahomey and cisgender is nowhere to be found.

But for a generation that red encyclopaedia – most were red – represented one of the few windows of information onto the world. There was no Discovery Channel or National Geographic and least of all the internet. There were only magazines, newspapers and the encyclopaedia – which was sold to families by door-to-door salesmen.

Former Times of Malta journalist Mark Micallef described the volumes as his “1980s version of the internet”.

Indeed, many students used the books to gather information for school projects, spending hours copying down notes. Charles Duncan described it as “hard work in the absence of internet” since there was “no cut and paste” option.

It was lots of small print and research for Dawn Pace Asciak but the books also represented “team work with family and siblings”.

For school assistant head Audrey Massa, the books were a window onto the rest of the world. “Randomly opening a volume and discovering that there’s a very big world beyond Għadira. Letter M was my favourite,” she wrote.

Massimo Farrugia, a former journalist, who now works in the European Parliament, said the encyclopaedia was used for an infinity of homework. “The irony is that with infinite information at our fingertips today, students often don’t bother to read anything; they just copy and paste,” Mr Farrugia noted.

Randomly opening a volume and discovering that there’s a very big world beyond Għadira

For some, like architect Simone Vella Lenicker, the photo reminded her of “rainy winter evenings when we would look up something and discover a whole new world of other things on the same page”.

But for Ms Lenicker, the heavy books also came in useful as weights to flatten her mother’s carpet after being rolled up all summer. Some of the boys would probably have used them to weigh down a Subbuteo pitch.

The tread of mostly nostalgic comments about how the red volumes rekindled memories of the childhood home – Davinia Shead said they reminded her of her “daddy’s study” – were however punctured by the frank admission of John Spiteri.

He wrote: “Thank God I was born in the era of Google!”

And that pretty much sums up the death knell of the encyclopaedia volumes as computers and the internet became the in-tool for parents yearning to give their children the best education.

Chris Gruppetta, publisher at Merlin Publishers, said the internet has not made books obsolete – book sales are still a healthy market globally – but multi-volume encyclopaedias are pretty much the exception.

“The reasons are quite obvious: encyclopaedias would be outdated the moment they are printed, the information on the internet is available for free and much easier to source,” he said.

Illustrated children’s encyclopaedias have survived though, primarily as gifts for special occasions.

The onset of the internet has changed the printing industry, Mr Gruppetta said, but following the e-book surge there seems to be a return to the printed book.

“Ironically, since its earliest days, the internet’s biggest sales item has always been books. Amazon was among the first internet merchants to ship books because they are compact to post and do not come with particular specifications like clothes sizes.”

At 25, the internet has been blamed many a times for the demise of many things, including books, television, the film industry and person-to-person communication.

Change may be a better word to describe the impact but for those red volumes the internet signalled death.

Journalist James Debono captured his memory of the encyclopaedia so: “Hours spent reading on red giant stars and 19th century US presidents… the love of useless but so useful knowledge.”

It leaves you wondering whether the internet in all its infinity does kindle the love of useless knowledge.

kurt.sansone@timesofmalta.com

* Cisgender is a term for people who have a gender identity that matches their assigned sex.

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