The thing is, back in the day, you couldn’t just look up ferns on the internet, you actually had to go looking for information on ferns specifically, and it’s very likely that after a lot of really annoying visits to various libraries looking through botany textbooks, an author (or a group of authors) decided they were going to collate everything they found about ferns and stick it in one collection.
So when someone else comes along and goes “I need to know something about a very specific fern”, the librarian can go “You want that 8 volume encyclopedia on ferns over there” because they know that it has every single fern on the planet in there, and you don’t need to spend 8 hours looking through every botany textbook and making the room smell like cheap coffee.
What I’m saying is it was probably done out of spite, not genuine interest.
The thing is, back in the day, you couldn’t just look up ferns on the internet, you actually had to go looking for information on ferns specifically, and it’s very likely that after a lot of really annoying visits to various libraries looking through botany textbooks, an author (or a group of authors) decided they were going to collate everything they found about ferns and stick it in one collection.
So when someone else comes along and goes “I need to know something about a very specific fern”, the librarian can go “You want that 8 volume encyclopedia on ferns over there” because they know that it has every single fern on the planet in there, and you don’t need to spend 8 hours looking through every botany textbook and making the room smell like cheap coffee.
What I’m saying is it was probably done out of spite, not genuine interest.