Back in our young and foolish days, Kris and I bought an encyclopedia set from a door-to-door salesman. This was in 1995, at the very cusp of the digital age. We had been on the internet for about a year, but we had no way to know that one day very soon the World Wide Web might make printed encyclopedias obsolete.

So we bought an encyclopedia set. Naturally I charged the $500 to my credit card.

We used the encyclopedia for several years. Then in 1999 we discovered Google. The leather-bound volumes began to gather dust.

Even so, when we moved to a new house in 2004, we took the books with us. We installed them prominently in the living room. But we never used them. Eventually we moved them to storage. For two years, we tried to sell them at our neighborhood garage sale. The first year, we priced them at $50. Last year we priced them at $20. Nobody wanted them.

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