Grolier

Yesterday, in the course of a break taken at the very conveniently located Holiday Inn at Solstice Services on the A303, I happened to notice an encyclopedia, about twenty volumes of it, occupying two of the sections of one of those room dividers favoured by the public areas of larger hotels, often used, inter alia, to hold books, plastic pot plants and what the French call bibelots. The sort of stuff you suspect of being bought by the cubic metre from some huge warehouse full of same, located in some industrial estate convenient to the motorway network.

It so happened that, prompted by watching a chunk of a drama about nasty goings-on in the land of the midnight sun, I had looked up the Sámi (of reference 4) in our Chambers Encyclopedia at home, a resepectable encyclopedia dating from the early 1960's. Rather to my surprise, no entry for the Sámi. So here was an opportunity to try again. But extracting the volume for 'S', still no Sámi. BH helpfully suggests that maybe I should try for Lapland in the volume for 'L', Lapps being a rather derogatory Swedish name for the Sámi, not longer used by decently woke people. And there they were, occupying about half a column.

Turning back to the beginning of the book, I found that it also dates from the 1960's, so one wondered how exactly it wound up in the Holiday Inn. Presumably, another warehouse full of such stuff. The publisher was Grolier, now swallowed up by Scholastic, and according to Wikipedia was once strong in the door-to-door encyclopedia business. Which was exactly what this one looked like: decent enough, but cheaply printed and lacking the rather grander editorial wrapping of a Chambers or a Britannica.

I associated to my two days, back in the late 1960's, as a door-to-door salesman of encyclopedias for a rather dubious outfit called Merit, preying rather successfully on the more worthy inhabitants of council tower blocks in and around London, the ones who were keen to better themselves and their children by whatever means they could. The task being to persuade them that buying a large encyclopedia from a company they had never heard of was the way forward. Part of the patter was a story about how they had been especially selected for participation in an important exercise in market research. In my defence, I can say that I was no good at it and did not last very long.

PS 1: the very thing is snapped above, lifted from Abebooks.

PS 2: rather US flavoured. BH learned that the way to refurbish a lawn was to sprinkle seed and fertilizer on the snow during the winter and just let it percolate down to the frost-broken ground, all ready for the Spring.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grolier.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholastic_Corporation.

Reference 3: https://www.scholastic.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi.