The New Book of Knowledge, Grolier Incorporated, November 1968

Those of us of a certain age may remember the encyclopedia salesperson, who went door-to-door in many neighborhoods in search of families who wanted to enrich their children's educations through purchasing encyclopedias and related reference books. Such books were available for use in libraries of course, but the salesperson emphasized the convenience of having the books instantly available at home whenever a child needed to utilize them for a school assignment or just for leisure reading and exploration.There were several prominent encyclopedia sets available during the late 1960s and 1970s, including the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and the World Book Encyclopedia. Also available was The New Book of Knowledge, the encyclopedia intended specifically for children.

Most encyclopedias of the era were written at one reading level for all the topics covered in them. The New Book of Knowledge's approach was a bit different in that it tailored the reading level of the topic to the grade in which a child was most likely to study that subject. For instance, an article on basic addition and subtraction would be written at around a first grade level, while an article on photosynthesis would likely feature the language and syntax of the upper elementary grades. The goal was to make sure a child could easily understand the subjects presented, but also to provide more challenging reading material in more advanced subjects...an encyclopedia which could "grow" with the child's needs. To keep the material up-to-date, Grolier published a supplemental volume each year of various timely topics and new developments.

Advances in technology have made the door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson a relic of the past, and even hardbound encyclopedia sets such as The New Book of Knowledge themselves are fairly scarce nowadays except in schools and libraries. But years ago, long before there was an internet, they were an essential part of childrens' research projects and a window into unexplored worlds. They were the "Google" for us Baby Boomer and Generation X kids.