A mid-century kids encyclopedia is pure upcycling gold

I try to find all my source materials at local thrift stores. But occasionally, I have things shipped to me from hundreds of miles away, cringing at my carbon footprint but unable to resist.

Yesterday was one of those times. My hard-working mailman lugged a heavy cardboard box up my front stairs and into my house. Guess what was inside?

A big box of creativity just waiting to happen!

Really, it's more exciting than it looks. It's a full set of The Golden Book Encyclopedia from 1960, with an atlas and dictionary thrown in. 

A while back I found a single issue at my local St. Vincent's (volume 4, "Chalk" to "Czechoslovakia"). Its size made it a candidate for a tablet case, and the illustrations were well-drawn and just plain fun. But would it sell?

It would. And did, in less than a day. 

So I searched for more Golden Book encyclopedias at my favorite second-hand haunts. But no luck. So I went online, and hit the jackpot.

Why do I love these books so much? First, look at the collage on the cover above.  Crab, clock, cotton, chemist, cone (as in "pine"), citrus, coral, concrete, color wheel, cork. It's the stuff of a bad dream. It took a real genius to figure out how to group these items together in a compelling, realistic illustration.

I love the cover of volume 2 ("Arthur" to "Blood").

Where else would you see a portrait of Beethoven flanked by a bunch of bananas, against a background of bark and bamboo?

If you think about it, this kind of alphabetic organization is an artifact of the printed medium. It's the best way to arrange a large amount of disparate information -- how else could you quickly locate the entry for "Barnacles" in thousands of pages? 

But this ordering system makes no sense in the digital world. I can Google "barnacles" and go directly to the information, bypassing "Bank" and "Barnum, Phineas Taylor."

I'm Barnacle Bill the...oh wait...

I love these strange juxtapositions! Volume 2 ends with "Birthstones," "Bison," "Black Death," "Black Sea," "Blarney Stone, "Blizzard," and "Blood." It's a found poem.

Another thing I love are the illustrations. Some depict categories of things. And not the things you'd expect youngsters in 1960 to be curious about.

Other illustrations show how people do things, stop-motion style.

Looks easy, doesn't it?

Each section begins with a stylized version of the letter it covers, along with an explanation of how it got its shape. The letter N, for instance, started life as a snake.

I love these books so much -- do I dare carve them up? I would hesitate, but despite their charm, they aren't rare. Plus, they smell a bit musty. Why not give them longer life as a tablet case or collage or...

Notecards! That's the first thing I made. Here's a sample.

Yes, I started with volume 1, "Aardvark" to "Army."

More like this

• Don't know much about type-writ-ing. Don't know much about tab stops.
• Must love dogs -- and these silly dog photos
• New life for old book pages -- upcycled snowflakes, packaging and cards
• Old book illustrations become collaged notecards
• Secret of the upcycled book -- Hardy boys are hardly bad
• Thrift store find -- retro Boy Scout handbook from 1943