I have known The Wonder Encyclopedia For Children for as long as I can remember. During my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s it lived in my bedroom on a rather nice council estate in mid-Cheshire. I was fascinated by it on the whole although the ‘Tales From Other Countries’ and ‘Things To Do On A Rainy Day’ I tended to avoid. I loved the science, technology and a lot of the history.
Of particular interest for some reason were the articles and diagrams of Tube stations in London. Even though I never went to London until I was nine or so (and don’t recall going on the Tube even then) I thought the idea of travelling under the ground was wonderful. Also Tube-related were photos of Golders Green in north London from before and after the arrival of the trains — the earlier picture was of countryside while the later was of part of a city.
Two or three years ago I decided I’d have a go at scanning some of the pages and turning them into text so that I could maybe stick them on the web. It is not a fast process. The basic workflow is to photograph the pages with the camera on a basic, low cost but sturdy Chinese copy stand, feed the photos to ReadIris and ask it to work out where the text is (which it usually gets right) and then save the text as just text. The quality of the text which gets saved is decent and has improved in later versions of ReadIris but I still have to read it all the way through to fix it up and it’s this which makes the process slow. I capture the encyclopedia’s poor quality photos as best I can too. After that I turn the whole lot into a web page which is the easy bit. If I’ve missed anything which the picture to text conversion has got wrong please do let me know.
I learned quite recently that there was a second volume available although unfortunately I have never seen it.
The encyclopedia is quite definitely of its time. Social attitudes have changed a lot in the 86 years since it was published. When I was eleven years old the book had been published less than 30 years before — what the late 1980s are to today so the early 1930s were from the early 1960s. At some point I may write an essay (now there’s a word you don’t hear often today!). Depends how I’m feeling.
Peter Gaunt, 20 September 2019