Welcome to my personal tribute to one of the most wonderful experiences of my childhood: The “Childcraft” Encyclopedia.
The Anticipation
The year was 1983 and at three years old, I began to accumulate some of the first clear memories that I still retain in my life. A recently diagnosed high cognitive ability for my age, which in my mom’s words also translated to having a “gifted” child, motivated my parents, both primary school teachers, to seek ways to provide me with the best mental stimulation possible within their limited economic resources.
My father, who years before had been fired from his teaching job for participating in union activities, had to work for a while as a seller of educational textbooks and had a copious collection of these texts, as well as a large encyclopedia from 1970 called Enciclopedia Cumbre. He knew that none of these books would captivate my restless attention, especially since, by that time, color television was fiercely snatching the attention of Colombian childhood, away from the classic children’s books like Nacho Lee, La Cartilla Charry, or “The Joy of Reading”.
It was then when a literary promoter (euphemism for encyclopedia salesman) from the Spanish publishing house Salvat, visited my father at the headquarters of the district teachers union and told him about the encyclopedia that had become a sales hit in Spain and had now arrived in Latin America to stay: The Childcraft Encyclopedia, but named in Spanish “El Mundo de los Niños”.
Then came the home visit that I remember clearly as for the first time I had in my hands a book that powerfully caught my attention. With its brilliant pages, colorful drawings, large fonts, and interesting content, it was love at first sight. I remember pointing at images, reading paragraphs out loud, and flipping pages at full speed while my parents watched me smiling and the salespeople looked at them in turn, not with less joy.
From that visit, I kept the anticipation of soon having the new encyclopedia at home to devour it entirely and a piggy bank that was a miniature replica of one of its books.
A New Family Member
Some days went by, probably a couple of weeks until the day when the cardboard box with blue letters containing 15 beige cover books finally arrived at our house. From that moment on, they became another member of the family, a teacher, companion, and unlimited entertainment, without the need for cables, electricity, operating systems, or monthly payments (Well, except for the 12 months my parents spent paying for it).
There are many memories I could detail: My dad reading the stories and fables from volume 2, doing the voices of the characters, hours of fun with the games from the Plants volume, discovering the world through “How Things Work” and the Universe thanks to “World and Space”.
The Nostalgy Search
Many hours of fun turned into nostalgia in early 2014 when I was telling my wife about those hardcover friends that contributed to a very happy childhood. I wondered where the collection had ended up and began tracing it from the last time I saw it in the library of our old house in the neighborhood of Gustavo Restrepo in Bogotá, back in 2006.
Abandoned by me and my sisters and having failed to win the love of my daughter and my nephew, the beloved books ended up in a rural children’s home in the municipality of Fómeque, Cundinamarca, where my mother is from. There they surely continued to make many boys and girls of the rural area happy. But the home no longer exists, so probably the encyclopedia is in someone’s house, or sadly, perhaps in some landfill.
Seeing the option of recovering my old encyclopedia as unfeasible, I began searching online and on virtual sales sites for someone who had a collection for sale, but not only did I not find more than a couple of sellers on the network, but the photographs they published showed the texts in a really sad state. I then decided to look for a well-preserved encyclopedia with my wife in some of the used book stores in downtown Bogotá. After asking in many places, finding some loose and quite defective copies, and about to give up the search, I asked a seller who was at the entrance of a warehouse, and the merchant’s response caught my attention: “Yes, I think I have one in good condition, wait for me here”.
The anticipation during the 15 minutes it took for the seller to return was similar to what is felt when you are waiting in a coffee shop, the reunion with a childhood friend. When he finally appeared with the books, I noticed to my surprise that it was exactly the same edition that I had 30 years ago and that the condition of the volumes was quite acceptable, perhaps better than the condition in which I remember having left my copies in most cases and finally, a price that barely reached a third of what I expected to find for a work in similar condition, and up to 10 times less than some copies I saw around the network.
How This Site Was Born
Upon arriving at my home and showing the encyclopedia to my parents, it occurred to me to think that perhaps many people throughout Latin America would have undertaken a similar search to mine, and maybe they haven’t had the same luck. Others will remember the work fondly and will have searched Google hoping to find some of the texts but like me, they would have concluded that there is no such thing.
So I decided to do the dirty work and bring The Childcraft to the digital era, not only for the nostalgic like me, but also for the new generations, who might find in this work the magic that I found in my childhood and that cultivated my interest in science, nature, technology, and literature.
This effort will be worth it if somewhere in the world, some mother or father, uses any of the content of this website to read a story before bedtime to their daughter or son, if some child gets interested and starts exploring all the virtual volumes or if some nostalgic person sits with their parents to remember the good times in the company of the letters and graphics of the encyclopedia.
The site has no profit motive, has no cost, and the only donation I hope to receive are the comments from readers on each of the pages of this page – a tribute to the fantastic Childcraft.
With love,
Manuel R Avila
