Material Meaning- The Story Behind the Antique Cyclopedia
Cyclopedia ManneKIN
The Treasure Hunt.
The Encyclopedia Britannica was the gold standard of my youth. I thought families who owned the full set were not only smart, but rich. I’d heard the collections were sold door to door—which they were, until 1996—though no salesman ever knocked on ours.
We saw the ads on our small, square television, which sat on a side table in the corner of the living room. You turned it on and off with a dial. If the volume was low or the picture went fuzzy, you got up to fix it—adjust the antenna, jiggle a knob, maybe even slap the side. Some people wrapped tin foil on the antenna tips. I never understood why.
The picture on the screen was black and white.
There’s so much obsolescence in this story already.
I was invited to sift through a discarded personal library—told I could take whatever I wanted. My friends, collectors of antique gas engines, were on a treasure hunt of their own. The estate belonged to a historian, author of more than thirty books.
If you don’t know what antique gas engines are, google it.
We don’t “do” cyclopedias anymore.
(And no, cyclopedia isn’t a typo. The term gradually gave way to encyclopedia between the late 1600s and early 1700s, from what I’ve read.)
We turned off a quiet rural road and onto the farm, passed a house with a generations-old tree beside it, and kept going. At the back of the property: barns, sheds, grain bins, an old school bus, and piles of rusty iron tangled in tall grass.
They pointed me to a white-painted outbuilding. It looked clean enough.
How bad could it be?
With mask, gloves, glasses and a bandana for my hair, I opened the door.
My friends hadn’t exaggerated. The stench of shit and piss hit immediately.
State heat and humidity. Poor light. A corroded printing press.
A blood-red trunk with faded Bavarian flourishes. (Hand painted German language religious documents inside.)
Tables piled with books, more crammed into boxes beneath.
Critters had been there- feasting and releasing.
I stepped back outside to regroup.
This would take stamina—and plenty of cold water.
Getting Down to Business.
The Action Plan.:
Lug stacks of books outside, into the sun and fresher air. Sort by topic and condition:
Cyclopedias, Encyclopedias & Dictionaries — High volume.
Engineering & Mechanics — High volume.
Gas Engines — Small box.
Farm Life & Tractors — Medium box.
Art — High volume, hallelujah.
Women — For historical reference to the times women were instructed how to behave “properly.” Even though these piss me off. Small box.
Keep for illustrations- small box
Misc. Keep- tote
Burn — Killed by shit and piss.
There was a series called The Student Cyclopedia. They wore leather jackets like rebel youth do. On the first page, a handwritten name: Lois Hollenbeck. I stared at the period after Lois. It marked territory.
Title page: in pencil—probably Lois—I found the year 1929. Underneath it, another: 1900, underlined. The zeros written faintly, like change on the dollar. And below that, again: 29.
The page read:
The Student’s Cyclopedia. A Ready Reference Library For SCHOOL AND HOME
embracing, HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, GEOGRAPHY, DISCOVERY, INVENTION, ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE.
Edited by C. B. Beach, M.A., Author of Guide to Literature.
Volume 1
C. B. Beach & Company, New York and Chicago, 1900
Copyright 1893 & 1897 by the editor
The first sentence of the preface:
“One of the features of modern teaching is the promotion of thought and investigation in the mind of the pupil.”
It explains the goal: cyclopedias aimed at “the capacities of the young.” And further defines those capacities:
“Care has been taken to admit no words or forms of expression which will not be understood by intelligent boys and girls of twelve years of age.”
There are 728 pages in this volume.
Also found: what appears to be a full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1911.
And so many art books. Score! I didn’t care how they smelled—I kept them all.
A surprising find for the Misc. Keep box: Street Gangs: Yesterday and Today by James Haskins, copyright 1974. A withdrawn library book—clue: the word “Withdrawn” was the only thing not blacked out inside the cover.
Into Farm Life & Tractors:
How to Build in the Country, Homestead Hints Book 3, edited by Donald J. Berg, copyright 1985. The advice? Don’t build in a valley. Don’t build on a hilltop. Find a waterside site. Make your home part of the landscape.
I thought about our old farmhouse.
Did the people before us get it right?
In Engineering & Mechanics:
Ancient Greek Gadgets and Machines by Robert S. Brumbaugh, copyright 1966. A library hardcover. Original price: $4.95. You can’t buy coffee and a donut for that today—not even in a small town.
In Misc. Keep:
The Complete Works of Guy De Maupassant: The Window and Other Stories, copyright 1910. Mostly text, but the decorative elements—flourishes in the margins—reminded me of tattoos. The kind every 20-something seems to have now.
I want to think more about that. And my kids’ tattoos.
Only now, while writing, do I realize I’ll use those “tattoos” on a current manneKIN in progress. I had meant to use illustrations as tattoos on the Cyclopedia ManneKIN, but it didn’t work out.
The reason I tolerated the stench and the heat that day is simple:
I love books.
Always have.
Even just holding them—what they represent.
Order History.
When I was a kid, I was allowed to buy one Scholastic book from the flimsy catalog we brought home from school. I’d fill out the order form on the back page and hand it to my teacher with cash. Then I’d wait. It could take weeks, but when the book finally arrived, it was mine.
My granny never questioned what I picked. I felt real agency in the choosing. Each book joined my slow-growing collection.
We didn’t have much money living with Granny—sometimes not enough. She complained about it often, so I know. And I know she did the best she could.
When I became a parent, my kids brought home the same Scholastic order forms—but there were no restrictions. For the record: we also maxed out our library cards—ten books per person, thirty books in our shopping cart, and not a single grocery item among them.
Books feel like a necessity to me. I order them regularly. When they arrive, it’s the best day of the week (I have many best days). This week, three new titles joined our shelves. I’ve already read two.
Initially, I couldn’t imagine cutting up antique cyclopedias or pasting their pages onto a mannequin. The idea felt wrong—almost sacrilegious. Evil historical figures burned books that didn’t support their propaganda. Religious authorities banned books they feared would taint the soul or feed the devil in us.
Books represent freedom to me. That first taste of self-determination came with those flimsy Scholastic catalogs in my greedy grade-school hands.
Google said it’s ok.
The books that weren’t quite “Burn pile” material but were too damaged for a shelf could be used in an art project. According to Google, their poor condition and outdated content give them no monetary value—so, they’re best repurposed as creative material.
Ok then. I could transform the deformed and defiled into something new. Assign alternate meaning. Restore relevance. Honor the authors. Make them significant again.
Once the books were home, they stayed in their boxes until I’d cleaned each one with a watered-down bleach solution. I knew this wasn’t a restorationist’s method. I wore gloves. Wiped inside and out—the leather bled a little. Cleared away spiderwebs, moth beds, dust, and mildew.
I flipped the pages upside down to shake out what history had left behind: pressed flowers, handwritten notes on formal stationery, postcards to friends and family, receipts, newspaper clippings.
People before me held these books in their hands. They read them. Turned their pages. Left their mark.
Go Time
Before getting to work, I queued up This is Love on the Bluetooth speaker. I chose the podcast to fill the space with stories of love while I carried on with what I love to do most: make art. Not just art—art from books. Two birds, one stone (a terrible phrase if you picture it).
It was the perfect fit. Love, magnified—episode after episode, starting with the January 23, 2018 intro and ending with Beneath the City from July 27, 2022. No more episodes needed. Cyclopedia ManneKIN was completed on May 11, 2025.
In the making, I kept thinking about who decides the information that shapes our understanding of the world. If those people came to supper and sat around our dining room table, what would that photo look like?
When the world was smaller—BI (Before Internet)—I imagined knowledge as a vast but containable circle. Huge, yes, but still finite.
Now, PI (Post Internet), the circle has exploded. Knowledge no longer holds shape. It’s greasy. It’s pornographic. It’s selling us cheap crap we don’t need and stoking our self-loathing with endless images of youth and beauty in some tropic paradise far, far away from our actual lives.
I thought about Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina—one of my first Scholastic picks. I remembered the character’s mustache, his hair parted down the middle, the fancy pants, bow tie, and caps. I’d never seen a man dressed like that before. Where was he from? I wanted to go there.
I remembered the three shelves in our coat closet that held my stepfather’s books—after we left Granny’s to live with our mother. Those books scared and excited me. At twelve, I found The Diary of Anaïs Nin. I read most of it inside that closet.
Then came The Story of O. My mouth formed an O, my eyes went wide. It was my first experience with erotica.
I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, A Man Without a Country. Carl Sandburg’s poetry was there. Studs Terkel. Hemingway. Shel Silverstein.
Treasures. I spent a lot of time in that closet.
Knowledge is for sharing.
I thought a lot about my BFF while making the Cyclopedia ManneKIN. We’re opposites—it’s fascinating. The things I fear are usually the things I don’t understand. Science things. In my mind, everything is always on the verge of exploding. I live in a virtual minefield.
But my BFF explains why this can’t happen. I feel idiotic for forgetting what I probably learned in high school or college. But his knowledge instantly relieves my fear. And for that, I’m deeply grateful.
The things I don’t hold can be held by someone else.
And when I see dumbfound on his face, it’s my turn to share what I know. To ease his mind.
Together, we form a more complete and useful library.
