A Whole Lotta Fancy Going On

Oh God, this was heartbreaking.  I really relate to this since I always coveted encyclopedias when I was growing up in the pre-internet 80s.  I imagine that for a lot of us, encyclopedias were tickets to the outside world.  My parents seemed to only own religious books, so I was always insanely jealous of friends who had sets of encylopedias in their houses.  I couldn’t imagine having that much information in my home where I could learn without being forced to like I was in school.  It seems funny thinking about it now since the internet has made sets of encyclopedias obsolete.  But reading this great story by Patti Smith totally brings me back to that time when I desperately craved information and had a really difficult time finding it.