As is the case with all rare books and other collectibles, the more scarce an edition is, the more likely it is to have a bigger spread between supply and demand, and thus the higher the monetary value. Old encyclopedias are attracting collectors primarily for two reasons: scarcity and information. Falling victim to the limited shelf space availability at the library’s storage facility, the volume remained un-accounted for in the basement for 46 years. The volume owner, the California-based Huntington Library, received the gift in 1968 from the American daughter of Joseph Whiting, a Presbyterian missionary who once lived in Beijing. The complete Ming dynasty-era book containing 10,095 volumes and totaling some 370 million hand-transcribed characters is believed to be scattered across various locations throughout the world. Interest in old encyclopedias re-surfaced last month when a long-lost volume of the Yongle Encyclopedia of 16th-century China, representing part of the world’s largest known general encyclopedia at its time, was found in California.

Encyclopedic knowledge has moved to more accessible electronic media on the internet with older important editions such as the Britannica 11 th edition now in the public domain being accessible to modern scholars and other interested parties of cultural artifacts. Libraries and collectors of books of the genre of “Education/Reference” are probably the only owners of bulky sets of encyclopedias these days.

The four feet of book shelf space that it occupied until the day it got sold for a small profit, was a luxury I could not afford. Soon after, I realized that there was an additional cost beyond the $20, in the form of storage real estate.

As an extra bonus, it came with the Britannica Year-Book from 1913, published the year after the sinking of the Titanic. Fascinated by the idea of owning a cross section of the trunk of the tree of knowledge just prior to the First World War, when the publication was at a crossroads with its transition from being British to becoming American, I bought the 29 volumes for $20. Stopping at a yard sale a few years back, I picked up a set of The Encyclopedia Britannica 11 th edition, produced during the year 1910.

Price of britannica encyclopedia