Raymond B.C. Smith, age 8, of Islington, M for his  question

What is an encyclopedia?

When our tummys get hungry, we can go to the kitchen shelf and take down a can or a package of food. But our minds also get hungry. This happens when a young person wants to know something   when he feels almost ready to burst with curiosity. This is the time to go to an encyclopedia and take down a book from the shelf. Here he should be able to find the answers to what he wants to know about stars or starfish, magnets or magpies, porpoises or porcupines and countless other interesting items.
An encyclopedia is a storehouse of neatly arranged items in a row of books. We call the books volumes and in a big, important encyclopedia there are enough volumes to fill a shelf four or five feet long. These encyclopedias are written for grown ups to give them all the facts they want to know about all the things in the world and out of the world. But for a young person the words in these grown up volumes are too long and the language is too hard.
Naturally, this will not do at all because children are even more curious about things than grown ups, It was very easy to solve the problem by writing encyclopedias that young people can understand for themselves. As a matter of fact, the person who invented the word encyclopedia must have had this very idea in mind. He made it up from some older Greek words. In modern words we can say that the big word encyclopedia means all the subjects in the world for the teaching of children.
Way back in Roman days a great scholar wrote down all they knew about every subject in those days. He called his work Natural History and there were 37 volumes.
In the Middle Ages, scholars of England, France and Germany also collected together all the things they knew in their generations. In 1720, the Chinese wrote an encyclopedia which had 5,020 volumes.
Your up to date gift encyclopedia is just what it should be. The volumes have letters on the back to help you take the right book from the shelf and find what you want to know. The subjects are arranged by the alphabet. Each subject is a short article written in language that you can understand. In the book marked A, which is Volume 1, you will find articles with pictures, maps and charts on such subjects as armor and astronomy, Asia and the alpaca. In volume 17, with a T on the back, you will find an article on Toronto along with pictures of your own home town.
Many of the articles are written by different experts and no one person knows all the facts, even in an encyclopedia written for young people. So   the whole family, young and old, will want to share your wonderful gift book. You have lots of family fun when everyone runs to the encyclopedia to answer a question, find a fact or even to settle an argument.