Do you read encyclopedias?

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Antique dictionaries are great for that. Especially finding obsolete meanings for now-common words.

Since you're also a Scrabble-ophile, you might be interested in a novel called "Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn. It's about a society where, one by one, letters of the alphabet are banned for writing or speaking. The story is told in the title character's mail to family and friends. So by the end of the book, her grammar and vocabulary become very creative to avoid the banned letters.

I thought I was the only one in the world who took an hour to poop with a Webster's on his lap!! !

When I was young (back in the 1950's) I definitely enjoyed looking up articles in my parent's encyclopedia set. But, I never simply read every page. I might have "skimmed" every page, though.

I find myself ending up on Wikipedia on a daily basis.
When I was a child I would read my wild life encyclopaedia every day. I would learn all species by heart, and there was this fascinating taxonomical grid at the bottom of each article, where I could see how animals were categorised into phyla, orders, families, genuses, species, etc.
This only enhanced my fascination for the evolution theory. It's great to see life forms being categorised according to common ancestry.

Now I have a French encyclopaedia that dates from 1886: "Dictionnaire des Dictionnaires". Fascinating. Even the way they write about electricity, telephony and democracy shows that this is a remarkably old encyclopaedia. What;s more, the encyclopaedia also smells very good, since it is so old. I can read for hours on end in it.

If I had more time to read them I probably would. Once I decided I was going to read the medical encyclopedia we have at home, but I didn't get far. Also some years ago I would read Encarta often, which we had on CD. For now I just read Wikipedia on occasion.

I will read ANYTHING providing it is FACTUAL ! !

Hear, hear! So that excludes FICTION!

Oh, the glory of Wikipedia... I must restrain myself, the collective mind of humanity beckons me... I get on to look up info on Grover Cleveland for my History class, and instead I'm lost, lost in the never-ending swirl of freely-given knowledge. From Grover's page I follow some link, which quickly leads me to another. Economics, game theory, philosophy and literature, and I suddenly have squandered hours over the interlocking pages of that greatest of encyclopedias. I also have a multivolume set of Funk and Wagnall's, but what good is it when I can not click on a random word in the article I'm reading, suddenly to be delighted with fresh stores of text for my delectation?

Not to mention 'eclectation'!

As a kid I read dictionaries and encyclopedias (of different kinds) a lot, it could be just random words or articles, or I could look something up and then find lots of other interesting stuff.
That can still happen sometimes.

I love reading encyclopedias!

I read dictionaries, books and encyclopedias every time I can. I read at less a random article on Wikipedia every time I'm surfing on the web, that was the way I found an articleand read about AS. I love adquiring new knowlege and store the new data on my hard disk

Yes, I did read encyclopedias a lot. Not just looking up articles on topics that I was interested in. I would flip through the pages looking for interesting stuff to read.

I always have along with lots of technical books on engineering even though I am not an engineer