>Later, I introduced the encyclopedia to my kids. They had never used a print encyclopedia, and they looked at me like I was an alien, almost as if I were speaking a different language (such a trite expression, but man, is it accurate). I had hoped they could use the encyclopedia as an old-fashioned reference, but so far, they have completely and utterly rejected it, not even expressing interest or opening it once. That aspect of my plans for the encyclopedia has been a big failure.
The kids' reaction makes perfect sense to me and I grew up with an encyclopedia set in the house.
My family was poor so we couldn't afford the "nice" encyclopedia sets like Encyclopaedia Britannica. Instead, my mom bought the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia one-letter-at-a-time from the grocery store. E.g., the grocery store didn't have the entire A-to-Z set at the store. What happened was volume 'A' would be in the aisle near the checkout. You add that one book to your grocery chart. (One book wouldn't blow the whole household budget.) A few weeks later, the volume 'B' would appear. After a few months, you'd eventually end up with entire A to Z set. F&W was the "more affordable" encyclopedia and they brilliantly set up a "installment payment plan" by tapping into mom's weekly shopping habits. Very clever strategy to use supermarkets as the sales channel instead of commissioned door-to-door salesmen. But even that was too much money for us and my mom couldn't afford the entire set in one year. So the volumes she missed had to wait until next year with a new print edition which was a different color. So our encyclopedia set was a Frankenstein set combining different years. A lot of older HN readers will know what I'm talking about.
I used that F&W extensively in school but I don't wish I had another set of books in the house. Today's Wikipedia is much better. It covers thousands of other niche subjects that a limited set like F&W could ever possibly include. And extensive hyperlinks to see how topic-X-leads-to-topic-Y.
The limitations of the old style encyclopedia are immediately obvious when you go to actually use it. Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic. Even then if you're interested in something even mildly obscure it won't be in there at all. Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper, and worst of all they didn't even provide the sourcing information for the articles that they did have (maybe nicer ones did? The ones at my library did not), so as a research tool they were near useless.
I do remember that there was an exception for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which could be used as a source as long as it wasn't the only source. For some reason it was considered more scholarly than other encyclopedias.
> The limitations of the old style encyclopedia are immediately obvious when you go to actually use it. Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic.
This is a feature not a bug: encyclopedia articles are breadth-first introductions to topics. If you are just mildly curious about something you'll probably get what you need. If you want to know more you'll have a view of the "landscape" and so will probably understand a more specialized book better -- and even be better at finding the right specialized book in the library.
> Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper
Much the same as wikipedia and similar.
But, like wikipedia, they were sometimes useful starting points with those short articles hopefully giving you a keyword or two, or a reference to other articles in the encyclopedia itself, so you had something useful to search the rest of the library (by hand or by asking the original intelligent search algorithm: a friendly librarian!) for fuller texts about.
Also as a child I remember just randomly skipping to a page and finding some interesting fact, then following the references to elsewhere. I could spend hours learning random things I'd never actually need to know that way!
> Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic.
Same as the Web. My experience has been that more often than not I hit "buy/pirate a book" surprisingly quickly when I start to dig past what's on Wikipedia, which is often not that much. Usually something from a university press.
That's not how you use them. (at least not in my family). It was a read the whole thing deal. So much random knowledge.
We had the WorldBooks, but ran across Encyclopedia Britannica in the school libraries. The Macropaedia was _far_ more in depth than the Micropeadia, or WorldBook at its best.
As a kid, encyclopedias are great sources of broad information. You probably don't need to go any deeper than they do.
As an adult, encyclopedias are a great starting point, but cannot do anything more than scratch the surface of any subject they cover.
That's just the way it is, I think.
The key advantage that printed encyclopedias have over Wikipedia is that the experts writing the articles are chosen by editors and have to be able to demonstrate broad and authoritative knowledge of the subject, before they're allowed to put those words on paper. Not so with Wikipedia.
I think the idea behind them was you'd read them and when coming across a topic of interest you'd hit up the card catalogue at the library to find books that go deeper into the topic.
This used to be false! I have my dad's copy of the ~1910 encyclopedia Britannica and they were still trying to cover the entirety of the field of mathematics in those years!
I've got fond memories of my Funk & Wagnalls Science encyclopedia. It was "my" encyclopedia - it wasn't useful for all school projects, but it was great to just read. As opposed to the school library's encyclopedia that was better for more direct queries, but filled with topics I didn't care enough about to read through linearly.
I never associated it with being the budget option, but I don't think my set was comprised of different editions either. Also I think my parents could have afforded a Britannica if they had been turned on to the idea, but they were drawn to buying things incrementally from immediate sales channels. You're spot on about the marketing. I remember them always being prominently at the front of the store. From what I remember the first book was $1 or free with a grocery purchase or something like that, and then of course after reading through that I bugged my Mom to get the next one.
(Also I can't help but notice Macaulay's "How Things Work" on the bookshelf in the article. Another hands-down classic that I would definitely push towards kids today even if they don't take to encyclopedias. I believe he's written a follow up book for modern tech, too)
Macaulay taught Illustration at my college when that book was published. Before that book he made one’s on single topic buildings like cathedral and castle.
When I was growing up, I was fortunate that we did have an Encyclopedia in the house. My grandfather was a regional sales manager for Fields Enterprises, and sold World Book Encyclopedias. So, we had a full set.
It had all sorts of wonderful things inside, and I remember countless times asking my parents questions after questions and they'd get exasperated with me and tell me to go look it up myself. Six hours later, I would have missed dinner and it would be way past my bed time -- and I would have no concept of how much time had passed.
By sixth grade, I was reading at the college level, and my school had no idea what to do with me.
By the time I got to college and had a job shelving books in the main library on campus, I found out about Encyclopedia Britannica, which was clearly at least twice as big as World Book, and I found out also much more authoritative.
I owe my entire career, and pretty much everything I am to the encyclopedias we had when I was a kid, and my grandfather who made sure we had a set.
Funk & Wagnalls also had an English dictionary in the early 1970s with excellent etymologies, which seem absent from dictionaries when i've looked in a Barnes and Noble store.
I don't know what Barnes & Noble carries in stores or what dictionaries are printed now. Paper dictionaries have limited space for obvious reasons. The paper dictionary that ignored those restrictions, the Oxford English Dictionary OED, was 20+ volumes.
Now most dictionaries are online like encylopedias, again for obvious reasons, and the leading ones at least have etymologies:
The OED is the definitive historical dictionary of English, including its etymologies. Unfortunately it's not free, but you might be a member of an institution that subscribes.
The leading American dictionaries are Merriam-Webster, which has a free edition and a subscription-based unabridged edition (Merriam-Webster now is owned by Britannica, which was American last I knew), and American Heritage, which is free and which has a section on Indo-European and Semitic roots of words.
I had different encyclopedias at home, most of them targeted to kids. There were two which had specific subjects. One, science and the other, the human body. I believe they would have been more helpful than the internet – I did not have the internet, or even a computer at home at the time – because of the tactile experience. On a computer, everything blends together, and you have to do a more conscious effort to recall a particular fact. Later, I had access to Encarta but, I still preferred reading the physical books.
This has shaped my current learning process. I liked to explore a subject instead of getting a direct answer right away. Even when I'm googling, I click on a couple of results first before I'm satisfied. I'm not comfortable with ChatGPT for the same reason.
This takes me back. We had most of a set when I was a kid. I remember many times reading science articles over and over while eating cereal at the kitchen table. I guess not a lot has changed except I read wikipedia (or, let’s be honest, HN) instead.
My oldest child is a voracious reader, but she mostly reads fiction/fantasy. I got her a Neil deGrasse Tyson book that she liked. This article reminds me that I need to provide more of that sort of content.
I read all the scientific articles over-and-over and dipped into the other articles over time. Eventually I think I read much more than half of the full set. Not a bad thing. If we'd had smartphones back then I'm not sure I'd learnt anything useful.
F&W had a bad reputation (I had a copy as well as a child, for the same reasons, purchased a volume at a time at the grocery store), but it wasn't that bad. Microsoft eventually purchased the rights to it and many of the articles from their 1990s CD-ROM Encyclopedia (Encarta) were either taken directly from F&W or only slightly edited.
Good ol Funk and Wagnalls, we had the same set, bought through the same process...they also had a classical music record collection distributed the same way...volume 1 was Beethoven's 6th, which is one of my favorites to this day...
My mom bought us these, too. But she didn't always go to that supermarket (National, iirc), so we had, say: A-G, K, M-R, and XZY. Or something like that. Still, she was soooo excited when it started that it was infectious.
> The kids' reaction makes perfect sense to me and I grew up with an encyclopedia set in the house.
Same, and same, and I don't know why the author ever expected anything else. You can't give them a hoop&stick and then complain when they'd rather play with, I don't know, I'm old and childless, some modern toy.
What was the time period for this. Don't remember this at law. I got 14 year old handme down world books from my cousin and the giant Random House Encyclopedia in the 1970s. Growing up there was nothing but time and the ability to read.
My parents had Encyclopedia Britannica and I'm convinced that was a huge benefit to me that I'm still realizing today. I was born in 1965 and can remember even in elementary school any time I had a question my parents couldn't answer we'd look it up in the EB. Pretty soon I was habituated to just go there on my own and look up anything. When bored I'd pull out a random volume and just flip through it looking for anything that caught my eye.
I'm sure that was no small expense for my parents, but it really was an investment in us kids!
It's wonderful having access to all that and more on your phone, but there was something special about that long row of brown volumes. I was always excited when the annual supplement came; my brother and I would flip through it to see what new knowledge had been discovered!
I grew up with World Book encyclopedias and it was very much the same. Until we got a computer. Encarta was the coolest thing I had ever used and I spent hours playing with the interactive encyclopedia. After that I hardly touched the printed books.
Younger but very similar. Read A to S. I started T and went to college.
I think it cost about $2.5k.
What's odd is my parents never read it as they were illiterate.
I found most of the topics were very short. Going in depth was limited to the library books. Picking six books only to find them referencing themselves was annoying. Six books with 130% total page content between them.
I did learn how to read, skim, absorb content. I also discovered most people simply repeat information instead of using or validating.
In the 80's the encyclopedia filled the same niche that a smartphone does for me now. Whenever I had a small number of minutes to kill I grabbed a random volume and flipped open to a random page.
Nah, it's sites like HN and Reddit that curate the randomness for us. There is / was a service, the name escapes me for now, that would install itself as a hotbar in your browser, press it and it would send you to a random web page, depending on your configured preferences / interests. I'm sure the name will come to me randomly soon enough.
I used to think the library's utility was on an exponential decay, thanks to the internet.
Now, SEO spam has convinced me it's actually a bathtub curve, and is rapidly shooting back up.
This makes sense, historically. I'm sure there was a time when literally anything that had been printed on a printing press was worth reading.
I witnessed the time when anything that had been stored on a CD-ROM was worth reading, since generating CD-ROM worth of data, then producing them was ridiculously expensive (that time period lasted about 1-2 years).
Anyway, early internet, it was hard to publish stuff. As of this year, it's less expensive to write and publish stuff than it is to read it, so curated repositories that are hardened against spam are going to be important again.
There's a toplevel option called "random article" as well as the shortcut ctrl+option+x to go to a random article. If anything it's a way better serendipity generator.
Both HN & encyclopia's are curated sets of articles that work similarly when in a "filling time" mode -- they present you with a set of articles and you read the interesting ones.
Do you think there was better ROI to that time spent than now with the smartphone? Like, you "killed" those 5mins by learning something (however esoteric it may have been) versus sucked into a nonsensical Tik Tok vortex?
> In the 80's the encyclopedia filled the same niche that a smartphone does for me now.
I took this to mean the niche is "learning something interesting in a short amount of time" not "killing a short amount of time" so to me the OP implied they were using the smartphone to learn and not browse TikTok.
>When she saw the large photo of a shark spread across the spines of the 22 volumes, she frowned and said, "I don't want to see a big-ass shark every day when I walk in the room."
I've got to be honest, reading this I went through a similar range of emotions as the author: Surprise that a print encyclopedia still exists, curiosity about it, and a nibbling desire to buy one. But I gotta agree with his wife: I don't want a huge shark photo on my bookshelf. It seems like an odd thing to force on a $1200 purchase, especially when it could easily be put on dust covers that could be removed to leave a more austere, proper looking reference book.
I agree. The big shark photo would be fine in a school library or classroom (especially if it helps younger users put volumes back in the correct place), but it’s completely out of place for a home library.
I remember the world book as having brown/beige with gold letters. It was a boring look that actually seemed to give it authority. The photo on the cover/spine makes it seem like it’s desperate for your attention. Almost like clickbait working it’s way into the analog world
I rather like it, actually. It's a cool photo and I find it to be a nice art piece, kind of like an art print on the wall, versus a bunch of brown book spines. But I understand your viewpoint, too. Worth remembering that their biggest customer-base by far is libraries and schools, where something like that might be a better fit than a home bookshelf.
I for one find it sympathetic that they are trying to appeal to schoolchildren (who are supposed to use it) instead of adult tastes. I wonder how much is it based on market motivation? If you want a set of serious looking tomes as a visual thing, there are plenty of options on the market. If you are really serious, you can even re-bind them custom. Which I'd find kind of ridiculous for this set, but I think this is what people do to have a lawyer-style consistent looking library for show. (Of course for some books that are old and breaking apart it's a good option anyway.)
There is some value in having physical references, but for adults I would gravitate toward academic handbooks and such for topics that interest me. Could be ones for freshmen depending on my background, and ones from some years back should be okay for many subjects.
That's fair, and I think everyone is right on the money that the pictures make it more appealing to children and easier to put back in order.
I suppose were I to entertain this idea for myself, since it's mostly a vanity/interest project rather than a functional one, it's not like it would be out of the question to have them re-bound. I wonder what the cost would be.
The 2022 edition has a dinosaur on it while the 2021 edition has eagles, for what it’s worth. I am tempted to buy the eagle one for only $350 … but I don’t really have the space for it!
The original Encyclopedias in the 1700s was a major catalyst similar in impact to the internet for us. Especially when specialized ones developed in the 19th century. The cool thing about using a Encyclopedia is the random encounters with things outside of your initial search. I'd argue it has a higher information density in your field of view when you look at a pair of pages. Of course I'm an early Gen-X who continued to use research libraries well into the 21st century. I still advise youth to use library time as part of research as the serendipity of finding other information both within you interest in the general shelf area, seeing similar periodicals and even just other articles within a journal. And any university's reference sections are loaded with simply amazing stuff ontop of their information index subscriptions.
This got my attention. I recall reading my World Book encyclopedia back when I was a kid in the 1950s for many, many absorbing hours. Tremendous enjoyment.
I see that Amazon's selling the 2023 edition for $1200 BUT World Book is selling the 2022 edition new for $500 and the 2021 edition new for $400. There are many eBay sellers offering the 2020 edition used for $300.
This might be the best present EVER for my now 7-year-old grandson who can read but whose parents limit his iPad use to 1 hour/day.
In Germany the „Brockhaus Enzyklopädie“ used to have its place in every academic house hold. The 24 volume version filled an entire cupboard on its own, cost thousands but looked great with the volumes’ red shaded back and golden rims. Especially historic and technical articles were quite large and detailed and helped me with many homework assignments in the age before the Internet. They were much better than the typical CD-ROM based encyclopedias.
I am lucky to own the last print edition from back in 2006 (inherited from my father) that even contains an entry explaining what „Wikipedia“ is. My kids never want to use it. It’s depressing and amusing at the same time.
We have an old set, and some friends were over with their third grader, who had to write a report. She tried using wikipedia, but it popped up a 30 page article on an advanced topic she was trying to find a definition of.
I handed her the encyclopedia, and showed her how to look up the word. One paragraph later, she said "that's EXACTLY what I needed."
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The kids' reaction makes perfect sense to me and I grew up with an encyclopedia set in the house.
My family was poor so we couldn't afford the "nice" encyclopedia sets like Encyclopaedia Britannica. Instead, my mom bought the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia one-letter-at-a-time from the grocery store. E.g., the grocery store didn't have the entire A-to-Z set at the store. What happened was volume 'A' would be in the aisle near the checkout. You add that one book to your grocery chart. (One book wouldn't blow the whole household budget.) A few weeks later, the volume 'B' would appear. After a few months, you'd eventually end up with entire A to Z set. F&W was the "more affordable" encyclopedia and they brilliantly set up a "installment payment plan" by tapping into mom's weekly shopping habits. Very clever strategy to use supermarkets as the sales channel instead of commissioned door-to-door salesmen. But even that was too much money for us and my mom couldn't afford the entire set in one year. So the volumes she missed had to wait until next year with a new print edition which was a different color. So our encyclopedia set was a Frankenstein set combining different years. A lot of older HN readers will know what I'm talking about.
I used that F&W extensively in school but I don't wish I had another set of books in the house. Today's Wikipedia is much better. It covers thousands of other niche subjects that a limited set like F&W could ever possibly include. And extensive hyperlinks to see how topic-X-leads-to-topic-Y.
I do remember that there was an exception for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which could be used as a source as long as it wasn't the only source. For some reason it was considered more scholarly than other encyclopedias.
This is a feature not a bug: encyclopedia articles are breadth-first introductions to topics. If you are just mildly curious about something you'll probably get what you need. If you want to know more you'll have a view of the "landscape" and so will probably understand a more specialized book better -- and even be better at finding the right specialized book in the library.
Much the same as wikipedia and similar.
But, like wikipedia, they were sometimes useful starting points with those short articles hopefully giving you a keyword or two, or a reference to other articles in the encyclopedia itself, so you had something useful to search the rest of the library (by hand or by asking the original intelligent search algorithm: a friendly librarian!) for fuller texts about.
Also as a child I remember just randomly skipping to a page and finding some interesting fact, then following the references to elsewhere. I could spend hours learning random things I'd never actually need to know that way!
Same as the Web. My experience has been that more often than not I hit "buy/pirate a book" surprisingly quickly when I start to dig past what's on Wikipedia, which is often not that much. Usually something from a university press.
We had the WorldBooks, but ran across Encyclopedia Britannica in the school libraries. The Macropaedia was _far_ more in depth than the Micropeadia, or WorldBook at its best.
As an adult, encyclopedias are a great starting point, but cannot do anything more than scratch the surface of any subject they cover.
That's just the way it is, I think.
The key advantage that printed encyclopedias have over Wikipedia is that the experts writing the articles are chosen by editors and have to be able to demonstrate broad and authoritative knowledge of the subject, before they're allowed to put those words on paper. Not so with Wikipedia.
I think that in one of Woody Allen films a character complains about a restaurant that "the food is terrible and the portions are too small"
Why not?
I never associated it with being the budget option, but I don't think my set was comprised of different editions either. Also I think my parents could have afforded a Britannica if they had been turned on to the idea, but they were drawn to buying things incrementally from immediate sales channels. You're spot on about the marketing. I remember them always being prominently at the front of the store. From what I remember the first book was $1 or free with a grocery purchase or something like that, and then of course after reading through that I bugged my Mom to get the next one.
(Also I can't help but notice Macaulay's "How Things Work" on the bookshelf in the article. Another hands-down classic that I would definitely push towards kids today even if they don't take to encyclopedias. I believe he's written a follow up book for modern tech, too)
I remember being incredulous at the low price. My dad: "Wait until you see what they charge for 'B', kiddo."
It had all sorts of wonderful things inside, and I remember countless times asking my parents questions after questions and they'd get exasperated with me and tell me to go look it up myself. Six hours later, I would have missed dinner and it would be way past my bed time -- and I would have no concept of how much time had passed.
By sixth grade, I was reading at the college level, and my school had no idea what to do with me.
By the time I got to college and had a job shelving books in the main library on campus, I found out about Encyclopedia Britannica, which was clearly at least twice as big as World Book, and I found out also much more authoritative.
I owe my entire career, and pretty much everything I am to the encyclopedias we had when I was a kid, and my grandfather who made sure we had a set.
Now most dictionaries are online like encylopedias, again for obvious reasons, and the leading ones at least have etymologies:
The OED is the definitive historical dictionary of English, including its etymologies. Unfortunately it's not free, but you might be a member of an institution that subscribes.
https://www.oed.com/
The leading American dictionaries are Merriam-Webster, which has a free edition and a subscription-based unabridged edition (Merriam-Webster now is owned by Britannica, which was American last I knew), and American Heritage, which is free and which has a section on Indo-European and Semitic roots of words.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/
https://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/
https://www.ahdictionary.com/
Hope that helps!
https://www.etymonline.com
This has shaped my current learning process. I liked to explore a subject instead of getting a direct answer right away. Even when I'm googling, I click on a couple of results first before I'm satisfied. I'm not comfortable with ChatGPT for the same reason.
My oldest child is a voracious reader, but she mostly reads fiction/fantasy. I got her a Neil deGrasse Tyson book that she liked. This article reminds me that I need to provide more of that sort of content.
What was its reputation?
I had some well-written reports in grade school that were graded pretty harshly until the teacher figured out what year they were published.
I eventually returned to F&W indirectly after we acquired a copy of Encarta on CD-ROM along with our first PC.
Same, and same, and I don't know why the author ever expected anything else. You can't give them a hoop&stick and then complain when they'd rather play with, I don't know, I'm old and childless, some modern toy.
So it wouldn't be too presumptuous to treat the chances as being very high that you've never given a child the gift of a very large cardboard box.
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I'm sure that was no small expense for my parents, but it really was an investment in us kids!
It's wonderful having access to all that and more on your phone, but there was something special about that long row of brown volumes. I was always excited when the annual supplement came; my brother and I would flip through it to see what new knowledge had been discovered!
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I think it cost about $2.5k.
What's odd is my parents never read it as they were illiterate.
I found most of the topics were very short. Going in depth was limited to the library books. Picking six books only to find them referencing themselves was annoying. Six books with 130% total page content between them.
I did learn how to read, skim, absorb content. I also discovered most people simply repeat information instead of using or validating.
Not odd. If they're anything like my family, they would have bought it hoping it would help you escape the same fate.
> Younger but very similar. Read A to S. I started T and went to college.
The animal kingdom has long suffered from overfamiliarity with aardvarks and the existential denial of zebras ;)
Like you, I am remembering the serendipity of the encyclopedia (and libraries for that matter).
Now, SEO spam has convinced me it's actually a bathtub curve, and is rapidly shooting back up.
This makes sense, historically. I'm sure there was a time when literally anything that had been printed on a printing press was worth reading.
I witnessed the time when anything that had been stored on a CD-ROM was worth reading, since generating CD-ROM worth of data, then producing them was ridiculously expensive (that time period lasted about 1-2 years).
Anyway, early internet, it was hard to publish stuff. As of this year, it's less expensive to write and publish stuff than it is to read it, so curated repositories that are hardened against spam are going to be important again.
I took this to mean the niche is "learning something interesting in a short amount of time" not "killing a short amount of time" so to me the OP implied they were using the smartphone to learn and not browse TikTok.
There's something to be said about not having ubiquitous portable distraction devices to encourage more "productive" uses of time.
I've got to be honest, reading this I went through a similar range of emotions as the author: Surprise that a print encyclopedia still exists, curiosity about it, and a nibbling desire to buy one. But I gotta agree with his wife: I don't want a huge shark photo on my bookshelf. It seems like an odd thing to force on a $1200 purchase, especially when it could easily be put on dust covers that could be removed to leave a more austere, proper looking reference book.
I remember the world book as having brown/beige with gold letters. It was a boring look that actually seemed to give it authority. The photo on the cover/spine makes it seem like it’s desperate for your attention. Almost like clickbait working it’s way into the analog world
There is some value in having physical references, but for adults I would gravitate toward academic handbooks and such for topics that interest me. Could be ones for freshmen depending on my background, and ones from some years back should be okay for many subjects.
I suppose were I to entertain this idea for myself, since it's mostly a vanity/interest project rather than a functional one, it's not like it would be out of the question to have them re-bound. I wonder what the cost would be.
I see that Amazon's selling the 2023 edition for $1200 BUT World Book is selling the 2022 edition new for $500 and the 2021 edition new for $400. There are many eBay sellers offering the 2020 edition used for $300.
This might be the best present EVER for my now 7-year-old grandson who can read but whose parents limit his iPad use to 1 hour/day.
I am lucky to own the last print edition from back in 2006 (inherited from my father) that even contains an entry explaining what „Wikipedia“ is. My kids never want to use it. It’s depressing and amusing at the same time.
For example, "Feminism" is "effeminate nature in men; also: women's movement".
It's a fascinating view into not so long ago.
I handed her the encyclopedia, and showed her how to look up the word. One paragraph later, she said "that's EXACTLY what I needed."
Indeed.