We had a full set of World Book Encyclopedias on a shelf in the den. Twenty-two volumes, dark green with gold lettering. They cost my parents a fortune and they were already out of date the day they arrived.
Every school report started the same way: pull the right volume off the shelf, flip to the right letter, and start copying. If your topic spanned two volumes, you felt like a real scholar.
The best part was getting lost. You would look up 'Egypt' for your history report and an hour later you were reading about deep-sea fish because one article led to another. It was the original Wikipedia rabbit hole, except it weighed forty pounds.