Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia

The Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia was a set of books that were sold through supermarket chains. Here in the Bay Area, I think they were at Luckys. The Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia was okay, not the Eleventh Edition of the Encylopedia Britannica by any stretch of the imagination, but about as good as the ol' reliable World Book Encylopedia that was standard in my grammar school library. The deal was something like, you got the first book (A-An) for $0.98 and every week a new book would come out and cost $2.99 or so. I don't know anyone who had complete set (exept maybe Debbie, see July 24, 2000), but my folks would occasionally pick up a book when we kids were good. So growing up my little sister and I had a very erratic encylopedia and when we had to do a report, we would try to get assigned subjects based on whether or not it would be in one of books we had.

Microsoft's CD-ROM encyclopedia Encarta is based (at least the earlier editions) upon Funk & Wagnall's. MS bought the electronic rights to the set and have been adding to it ever since. The first edition of Encarta was basically a port of these books with a few pictures and videos thrown in.