The Archive of American Television has launched an effort to present the historic broadcasts of the Omnibus series that offered cultural programming on many Sunday evenings between 1953 and 1961, hosted by the eloquent sophisticate Alistair Cooke.

There are two uses for encyclopedias – looking up specifics and browsing through interesting material. Here is a two-volume set that serves the second use quite well, but isn’t comprehensive enough to work for the the first