Every Wednesday at RamseyEss.com, I highlight an entry from “The Wonderland of Knowledge,” an encyclopedia set for children from 1968 that I found on the street in Brooklyn, waiting for the garbage man. This week: “Grieg, Edvard Hagerup.”
Recently, the powers that be took national treasure Bea Arthur away from us. At the age of 86, [...]

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Every Wednesday at RamseyEss.com, I highlight an entry from “The Wonderland of Knowledge,” an encyclopedia set for children from 1968 that I found on the street in Brooklyn, waiting for the garbage man. This week: “wind.”
There are many forces in this world that man has attempted to harness only to have the mighty hand of [...]

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War costs money.
After suffering through the Great Depression, our nation sobered up and sacrificed, jumping into action to preserve our freedom. The Wonderland of Knowledge understands this, and to demonstrate the sacrifice that our country, as well as many more across the globe, in their entry on “World War II,” they provided this chart to show [...]

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Clearly The Wonderland of Knowledge gets it right when it goes outside and looks at nature. It has crazy captions for every bird, tree or animal that personifies it in some odd way. If you cycle through those entries I’ve written, each one seems to end with me flabbergasted at how insane the next entry is.
Here’s what Wonderland had [...]

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The reason that The Wonderland of Knowledge went out of business may be it’s totally lack of unbiased reporting.  We first saw this a few weeks ago in the encyclopedia’s entry on “Hitler.”
And now Wonderland shows its true colors once again:
 

Come on, encyclopedia! First you call Hitler “a modern Caesar” and now lacrosse is “fast and exciting?” [...]

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If any of you are following me over at Twitter, you know that I love puns.
However, and I find this a little surprising, as I read through The Wonderland of Knowledge, it would seem that there is nothing that will infuriate me as much as a stupid pun in this book. I don’t know if [...]

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Before I begin, this website will not have an April Fool’s prank. Also, me saying that there will be no prank is not a prank. And now I will continue with what I had planned on doing: speaking to a set of encyclopedia from the sixties as if it were a human being.
Look, Wonderland of [...]

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I do not know who Robert Clive, or “Clive,” as The Wonderland of Knowledge refers to him. I did not read the article that was written about him in the book. I did not look him up on Wikipedia to get more information. I know nothing about this man.
 

I just want to know why [...]

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All right I feel weird posting this, but…

Now, I recognize that a reference text needs to stay relatively unbiased, but doesn’t the text that goes with this photo just seem not critical enough? By which I mean “in no way critical?”

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The Wonderland of Knowledge was written with more hyperbole than any other English-language written in the history of mankind. In the past I’ve highlighted their overwrought, overly-important introductions that exaggerate the significance of whatever entry they’re talking about to amazing heights.
Apparently they ran out of steam when it came to “Forests and Forestry.”
“Do you live in [...]

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