Death of the physical library
One of the unsung disasters of contemporary academic life is the death of the physical library. There are so many disasters in current year academia, I doubt as anyone else grouses much about this, but as a great enthusiast for the KNN algorithm, I will complain about it.
My mid-late physics career had many happy hours spent in the LBNL research library; it is where I expanded my basic knowledge of the principles of physics to broader views. My early business career had many happy hours spent in the Haas school of business library; most of my good ideas had some origin there, prowling the stacks. At this point, every nerd is familiar with the google/wiki hole where research into one area can lead one. Ventures into a well stocked physical library have a similar effect, though very, very different. The Dewey decimal system of course makes for excellent search results. A book on a general topic may lead to a number of related books on the shelf. Futures trading books lead to options trading books lead to commodities economics and so on. Even better is the inadvertent walk past a shelf on the way to another shelf and have something interesting catch your eye.
Similarly browsing journal articles (after looking them up on INSPEC; a better tool than Google Scholar), you might find something published next to your article of interest which leads you down interesting paths, or broadens your horizons in a surprising way. This can only happen with physical books and journals. Database oriented searches are useful, but there is much encoded knowledge in the physical organization of the library. There is much encoded knowledge in Dewey Decimal Classification just as there is on the physical layout of the place. Nothing like this exists in database oriented systems; the KNN algorithm in libraries allows one to find new things.
Random sampling is also vastly more powerful in a physical library. I’ll never forget coming across the Chronicles of the House of Lords and reading about various expeditions, naval expenses and early rail systems installed in the United Kingdom. What a treasure that was; vastly better than slumming it through a bunch of wiki articles on the 19th century. Coming across the The London Times Imperial Trade and Engineering Supplement near my favorite seats in Doe library radically changed my views of economic history and the Great Depression. Some of the output of the various “studies” was also both laughable and sobering; do we really need so many shelves of scholarship about latino dudes sticking their pee-pees up each others assholes? Society has apparently decided this is far more valuable than studying Aristotle or the history of the Medes.
Libraries are an ancient and powerful way of discovering the world. So I was horrified upon visiting the Haas library and finding out it had been converted into cubicles and meeting rooms, so business majors can pay $40k a year to pretend they have a dystopian job giving power point to each other in a cube farm. I believe most of the books were moved to “storage” -though it is entirely possible that they sold them all to buy more Herman Miller knock-off furniture -there is no way of knowing. Theoretically books in “storage” can be obtained if you can discover them. Just like books are theoretically available on inter-library loan. Of course you have to discover them, which in my case, happened about 80% of the time by being in proximity to a related book. Otherwise you’re at the mercy of the library database system, which are of extremely variable quality. For example, most of them don’t allow you to query spatially along titles the way you do in the physical library.
Haas library was destroyed by barbarians as surely as the Library at Alexandria was. Perhaps one could make the argument that most business texts are hot garbage (they are), and most business majors are barbarians who aren’t literate enough to make use of a library (almost certainly true). None the less, the Haas library was useful to me, and presumably to someone else, and now it is gone. Vanished under night’s helmet as if it had never existed.
This creeping barbarism hasn’t limited to business libraries; I used to enjoy browsing in the section of Doe library pertaining to ancient Persian history. One day this section was gone, along with a hell of a lot else of who knows what. It wasn’t even replaced with anything identifiable like Herman Miller designed cubicles; just a bunch of empty shelves. According to the people who think this is OK, I could tediously look up keyword searches on Persian history and possibly find a couple of them; I couldn’t find the section and all the related sections. This is a towering vandalism the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Mongols sacked Samarkand. Literally the painstaking scholarship of centuries wiped out; the books moved to “storage” where nobody can find them and where they will rot, unread, unbrowsed and possibly unceremoniously sold on ebay or recycled into paper used for latinx queer studies when some bean counter decides they’re not worth anything because nobody ever takes them out of storage.
It’s literally happening everywhere; I assume this sort of demolishing of libraries must be taught as part of “library science” these days. Some insane metric is being optimized for; perhaps if a book isn’t checked out for a few years it’s considered useless. I can see the evidence of it everywhere; my copy of the glorious “Italy and her Invaders” by Thomas Hodgkin is from an extinct bible college, who didn’t think it worth handing on to successor institutions. It’s obvious hundreds of people handled these books before me; while it is available still at many libraries, it isn’t available at the one that purchased it, and since I no longer live in an English speaking country, it will probably only be read by me. Many other books I’ve picked up are purges from active libraries. No doubt after remaining in “storage” for some years, unread. Some vandalisms have been documented; none have been stopped, and the rot continues unabated.
We have access to great resources like LibGenesis and Sci-Hub which have opened up research in new ways that even very large physical libraries can’t reproduce, but the inverse is also true. Large physical libraries open up research in ways these resources cannot. Getting rid of physical books because we now have databases is like getting rid of sunshine because of the existence of vitamin-D pills and cod liver oil. The horrific thing about all this is it isn’t considered censorship or book burning; it’s considered modernization. These people need to be stopped, and the librarians responsible for these desecrations fired at the very least. People lose their careers over saying a magic word or offending some thin skinned imbecile: these people are literally burning the library of Alexandria -their names should live in infamy forever.
Related:
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/03/07/our-knowledge-of-history-decays-over-time/
Locklin on science 
One of the saddest day of my career was when IBM dismantled their research library at the historical Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights.
I had no idea. A relative has worked at the U of Penn library for years and years. I’ll have to get in touch and see if a similar purge is ongoing. There must be a few veins of gold to mine there.
Please report findings back here. I strongly suspect it’s done for weird “internal logic to librarians” reasons and they receive very little feedback on the topic. Like people optimizing their papers for impact scores which does fuck-all for actual scientific impact.
Maybe the excuse is “internal logic” but most librarians are dyed-in-the-wool liberals who hate dead white men and their ideas. Destroying every last copy of even some middlebrow classic history text probably makes their day. All under the cover of “it hasn’t been checked out recently”. Meanwhile, my local public library has every fairy flag imaginable hung up in the teenager section (where middle-aged white women get black-covered romance novels about wealthy cryptids).
Yes, regardless of the role metrics and “Library Science” might play, putting people who hate the past in charge of curating ang preserving the past is probably not the greatest idea in the world.
Well said. I miss libraries. When I was younger and skipping school I wasn’t drinking beer in the woods, I was hanging out in libraries. For a period when I was probably thirteen I spent quite a bit of time in a rare book shop. After several consecutive days of visiting the owner wondered who this kid was and, after he got to know me, showed me the “back room”, where he let me investigate first editions, leafs from Guttenberg bibles, and various incunabula. It felt like Indiana Jones. All these years later I remember vividly the look and smell of all those old books.
In grad school I’d spend hours in the math and physics libraries (which were joined) and the main library had rare book sections that made me feel like I was discovering something for the first time. Can’t replicate that with digital access via ipad.
The problem with the sacking of the physical libraries is they weren’t faithfully replicated. This is probably more obvious for people with movies or music. There are tons of movies from the last century that are great but, if you don’t have them on physical media, good luck fining them on a digital platform. Same with music. I have vinyl that is unheard of on the Tidal/Quboz/etc. platforms. Listening suggestions are no better then poor-man’s pagerank, so it is lost, and the monetary optimization routines really lose something that we had with radio manned by a good DJ.
The older I get the clearer it is to me that it is human tendency to maliciously erase the past. Some of this is attributable to the curse of dimensionality: there’s just too much information. Early physics is a good example. Nobody is going to read thirty years of publications to understand some concept that is neatly explained by one name unless you’re researching the history of science, as opposed to the science itself. But literature and history books seem to be erased because mankind needs to kill it off intentionally as it reinvents itself and manufactures a new provenance that prioritizes its novelty and immortality.
There’s a very great book I thumb through from time to time on E&M before and somewhat after Maxwell; Whittaker’s “A History of Theories of Aether and Electricity.” The ideas pre-Maxwell were these weird quasi-mechanical things that actually got pretty close. Just like digital physics ding dongs, they tried to model things with the machines of the time (1800s-1860) -stuff like gears and screws, more or less. All of that would have been lost without Whittaker doing the review. All those old ideas are preserved somewhere on microfilm or decaying journals, but getting to them would be a difficult work of scholarship now.
I’m almost certain nobody thought to do that with the transition between thermodynamics and stat mech, so whenever I look at old fashioned enthalpy/free energy thermo it looks bloody weird. Even more so with various forms of statistical inference which is mostly comparatively recent.
A lot of videos are on russian file sharing, but of course a lot of film doesn’t exist any more. Every few years someone finds a new Patrick Troughton Dr. Who episode on some tape in an old BBC station in the colonies. Music is mostly just gone. I hated lugging around the CDs I painstakingly collected, but after a few trips across continents and oceans unlistened they had to go.
I keep encountering “science-lovers” that have to prove their bona-fides by hating on aether theories. I’d really like to know what these people think field theories in general are?
I mean, our “aether” has Lorenz symmetry, but it’s not like we disbelieve the reality of points in space having a mechanical state with mechanical consequences. What do they think an electromagnetic field is?
(I mean, you can dispense with fields as an intermediary and work entirely off of sources, but then you have to keep track of the entire space-time history of all your sources to solve for motion. And those sorts of theories don’t deal gracefully with the creation and destruction of the source particles.)
You can also reify mathematical objects and not think too hard about what kind of system you’re trying to describe that supports all these “waves that don’t need a medium”, which is what I suspect most of this is.
There’s an explicitly Lorenz invariant aether theory described in Sommerfeld’s “Mechanics of Deformable Bodies” which is a great thing to thumb through. I should probably buy all 5 volumes; his optics book owns Born’s hard.
Scott,
Could you do a book recommendation list on pre-modern era physics books? (~pre-1950s)
I’ve been wanting to teach myself physics, but, intuitively, I’ve always thought that something was wrong with the current body of knowledge.
After watching interviews with Steven Greer and the various whistleblowers talk about the suppression of tech and physics knowledge by the MIC, I’m even more hesitant to pick up a modern physics book. Poisoning the well, so to speak.
Normally, I would think the recent information about UFO tech and a secret evil transnational organization suppressing tech as bullshit. But with everything going on I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s mostly malintent, instead of incompetence.
Read Kip Thorne’s series he’s legit
Thanks, I’ll look into it.
Although, if what the whistleblowers are telling the truth, then Kip Thorne’s work might include some type of physics “poison pill”.
The timeline of Bryce DeWitt’s work, then Babson’s Gravity Research Foundation, and Louis Witten working with Solomon Leftschetz at the Glenn Martin Company all take place within the 50s-60s, then go dark. Of course this could mean it didn’t pan out, but assuming it did then I find it very interesting that the US’s top anti-gravity researcher’s son, Edward Witten, would create string theory to “string” other physicists along for decades.
I had a similar experience at the University of Calgary library, where what was once the library has been hollowed out and replaced by a fancy new building that seems rather short on books. They also have ‘energy saving’ lights that only turn on in your presence such that the aisles all look dark except for the small section you are standing in, and you feel like the whole place is closed. Far from cozy.
All the learning I did in undergrad happened by going to the stacks after a lecture and saying ‘hmm what did Voltaire himself have to say about that…’ connecting the dots or just curiously bouncing around ‘who is so and so’, apocryphal gospels, what are they?
Yeah, we have those stupid “energy saving” lights – walking down those dark halls with the lights going on and off automatically makes me feel like I’m in “Event Horizon” or something, creepy vibe. As for the destruction of physical media, just wait until the next large Mass Coronal Discharge – a lot of people are going to wish that they had kept hardcopy…
I worked a year at a university that had those lights. They were insensitive and would flick off while browsing. However, I don’t want ypu to think they actually wanted to save energy. The ground floor of the library (no books) was illuminated brightly 24/7.
EU toilet lights.
At my local uni (U. of Maryland), the libraries have been decimated precisely as described here., during the past decade. Books “put in storage”, entire floors (!) converted to cubicles, the whole program.
Incidentally, books reduced to database entries here are not accessible to civilians (i.e. can only be retrieved by paying students or employees.) So for me they no longer exist at all.
The destroyers of culture have correctly identified libraries as an obstacle to their plans. And so I expect that at some point there will no longer be any serendipitously-browsable academic libraries in the English-speaking world. None of this was an accident, the product of incompetent employees, or the like.
One of the reasons I maintain my membership of the London Library (private members’ lending library in central London) is that they never deaccession a book (other than duplicates) — and their electronic catalogue permits a virtual browse along a shelf. Their collections for Victorian obsessions such as taxidermy, clairvoyance, the Lost Tribes of Israel, etc. are excellent. (That said, it is no use for mathematics, science or engineering books published after about 1900.) But into this eccentric English environment, a professional approach to information science has recently emerged: so we now have those energy-saving lights with motion sensors, lockers with electronic keys, and such like =groan=. And there is no longer a chief Librarian, instead there is a CEO not from a library background but with I presume “transferable management skills”.
William wrote,
And there is no longer a chief Librarian, instead there is a CEO not from a library background but with I presume “transferable management skills”.
This I think is the root of the book-destroying fashion in library management. Librarians love books and like to have them around. But librarians are managed by this kind of CEO who wants to optimize and monetize the library. That can’t be done with books..
My first professional project was a library catalog and circulation system for a university. That system ran for fifteen years until it was replaced by a COTS package, mostly for interoperability with other university libraries. The librarians I worked with were delightful. One of them had a poster up in her office, “libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries”. This seems to me true..
My university library at University of Cape Town, the Jagger, burned down a couple of years ago.. it was very sad. As a student I should have been working in the science and mathematics library but the Jagger had more interesting books and prettier girls..
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cultural-heritage-historic-library-destroyed-south-africa-blaze-180977539/
very interesting and provocative piece, but I only half agree. I owe a huge amount of my education to the physical libraries in my hometown and in my univerities, exactly for the same KNN algorithm that you mention. But the physical library started to die a long time ago and was killed IMHO by the idea that every academic need to write at least one textbook and by the avid editors that supported that, and the complicit colleagues that bought whatever. The KNN algorithm only works if you can assume that the next book by an unknown author has high quality with high probability. If this is not the case, the physical library becomes totally useless and expensive, I am afraid.
Even in the business library, littered with dumb technical analysis books in the trading section was still plenty useful. It is the job of the librarian to not buy shitty books.
My undergrad college had tons of different libraries scattered around campus. They were a place I could go when I wanted to get away from other people and study. Almost every discipline had one. The periodical stacks in the nuclear engineering library were in some creepy 3rd floor subbasement that no one ever went to – excellent quiet and privacy at all hours.
Many many years later, in grad school, things were far more cramped. The architecture was modern (open plan!), the campus was more crowded (smack in the middle of a cyberpunk dystopian megacity), and there was only one library. It was more open, with far less privacy. The desks had no partitions. And it was *crowded*, mostly with undergrads.
I have difficulty tuning things out. I can’t really do the hyperfocus thing where the circus and brass-band thumping around the room are invisible to me. Open-plan makes me twitch.
You’re absolutely right about the serendipitous random-but-related discovery process. One thing I occasionally do is take a walk through my institutions library (far smaller and more focused, but at least extant.) I browse around, and if I see things that are interesting, I take a photo then look it up on libgen or sci-hub later (thus “checking-out” the books or papers.) But there are many things I’d simply never consider looking for unless I physically stumble across it.
If it’s possible to replicate at all (ref. poem below), I wonder how attempting a “virtual library” would work? Some kind of set of “virtual shelves” with the ebooks arranged like they would be by a physical library? (Trying to think of how to capture that serendipity.)
Someone made some silly walking simulator of Louis Borges’s Library of Babel in a videogame somewhere. If you had sane shelving and organization and real books you could pop open and “checkout” to download the e-book, I wonder if it would capture the discovery process?
—-
These substitutes would irk a saint,
you hope they are what you know they ain’t
Burma Shave
Re: “checking out book from digital libraries”, see e.g. http://www.loper-os.org/?p=351
Libraries were the temples of modern civilization: the unironic, non-defensive expression of the idea that knowledge, honest memory, understanding, etc were good. That sharing it ennobled mankind.
They were what 17th-20th century western civilizations tried to make beautiful, as well as fit for purpose.
I don’t think we’re even capable of building something beautiful towards *any* ideal right now. Maybe space launch rockets. I’m trying to remember when the last time I saw a public attempt at actual art was. I’m thinking it was that bronze animal statuary in the medians of walkways and parks in Portland, OR that was destroyed during the Floyd riots.
One last random bit of memory: There was an old sci-fi novel (Vernor Vinge, I think) where an unfortunate 20th century guy had a stroke and they only managed to revive him sometime in a (disturbingly prescient) rendering of the current year. Unlike most of his, I think the novel was more flatly dystopian. One of the scenes had the character go to a university library looking to orient himself, only to find some tech company chucking the paper books into a destructive digitization device reminiscent of a wood-chipper – just rips out all the pages and scans the confetti as it goes by, then “reassembles it” digitally later (though it was implied they weren’t very careful because they doubted anyone cared anyway). Supposedly someone has access to the database, but probably not you, unless you pay the tech company for it. (Anticipating one of google’s efforts maybe.) Anyway, main character was horrified yet again at the bare shelves and destruction.
I remember a lot of articles I read a while back about university libraries mass-destroying books from their “storage” collections. (Because no one was actively using it *right then*, that means it’s okay to destroy.) (Insane metrics and optimization indeed. I’m becoming more and more convinced that, contra libertarian philosophy, “optimization” is *not* a good thing in most circumstances. It’s just the unfortunate byproduct of a competitive process that has run too long. Cambrian explosions and green-field-work are creative. Shakeout destroys that diversity and collapses things down into just a few performant, but brittle forms.)
The digital “book databases”, such as now exist, are and will remain just about totally useless, thanks to the copyrasts. (With the exception of warez, naturally. When it can be found.)
Yeah, that’s something that makes me angry. Due to Elsevier and Mickey Mouse, we’re going to screw up this transition where libraries are divesting themselves of their physical books, but we’re not allowed to access the digital ones. Our public cultural knowledge being shredded so that some gatekeeper can charge a shitty toll.
Alexandra Elbakayn – if it’s a pseudonym, it’s well chosen. If it’s a natural name, it’s a prophecy. She’s probably single-handedly responsible for the preservation of our scientific papers and their availability.
Good on libgen too. Just need to be able to do more with the pirate libraries.
> Alexandra Elbakayn … responsible for the preservation…
Unfortunately seems to be a gatekeeper at heart: refused (and AFAIK to this day) all offers of making mirrors of the warez.
Totally off topic but toastedposts mentioned sci-fi… recently there was a pretty good Lex F podcast with George Hotz. He mentioned The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, which I hadn’t heard of, and read. Pretty cool premise. Writing was muh, but good for sci-fi. (Also mentioned was Cyberspace Odyssey: Towards a Virtual Ontology and Anthropology, which I am wading through).
In the equivalent of the mustachioed bad guy rubbing his hands and cackling in glee at your misfortune, many libraries now call themselves “learning centers”.
Like everything else these days, they are named for their opposite.
This is the president of the American Library Association: https://twitter.com/edrabinski
Is it any surprise that libraries are going the way of the nuclear family?
Library patronage starts off young. I remember going to the library and bringing home mad stacks of books. Then I got to college and tried to use the library…except that there wasn’t really anything in there that was useful to my undergraduate education, and the few times I tried the books weren’t where they were supposed to be.
My wife had a similar love of the library, but more so as she lived in the city and could take the bus there in the summer–her family couldn’t afford air conditioning, so the library was one of the retreats.
She tried to imbue our daughter with the same love, but modern public libraries have become havens for the homeless with all that entails, and librarians, well, they’ve got agendas other than books. I suspect this plays out across the country.
We’re moving back to a marginally literate society, and this probably isn’t an accident.
I don’t know that there’s even a market for private libraries anymore.
> We’re moving back to a marginally literate society
Understatement. These, in recent centuries, still had well-stocked academic libraries that one could hope to visit.
Where we’re apparently moving back to is the pre-Gutenberg state of the art in re: access to (serious) books. That is, you’ll have whatever old tomes you managed to purchase yourself, at increasingly formidable expense (plus, optimistically, whatever you were able to find on Russian warez.)
I’ve noticed the same thing. At a university to which I went for a time, within the last decade, there was a plan underway to destroy the historical library, the largest building on the campus, and to replace it with a much smaller library, a coffee shop, and of course an entire floor dedicated to the university’s president, instead of merely most of a floor. The idea was to have an expensive robotic arm that would select the books from a pressurized room, so that they would take up much less space. When I asked the librarians if there were any effort underway to protest this, they remembered and spoke highly of me, because I was the only student on the entire campus who gave a fuck about, and the librarians themselves had no power to stop it.
Fortunately, the plan was put on hold, because one of the sports fields was damaged by a storm, and sports of course take top priority.
Upon graduation I worked in a Houston library for three years. We didn’t have much book burning, but the staff was flaming liberal. Blue-haired, braless lesbian types. They’d avoid acquiring conservative books if they could and I began to realize that the job itself attracts such people. Low-stress, rare confrontations. A “safe space” if there ever was one.
If anyone finds themselves in Houston and enjoys a beautiful library, stop by the privately-owned Lanier Theological Library (though you can’t borrow anything).
Mr. Locklin,
Thoughts on Andrew Tate?
Thanks.
A distraction from JPMC/Epstein.
This brought tears to my eyes. Where would i go when term papers were assigned when i went to college from 1971 thru 1974? I went to the college library. If it was lacking on my particular assignment. Well i got in my car and went to the Oklahoma city main library. I really liked that library. This is how socalism gets it’s strength destroy the books,rewrite them digitally leaving out things the government find irrelevant or just not how they see things. Which is with eyes that see but have no understanding or knowledge. This is one of the fastest ways to destroy civilization and that is someone else deciding what you should. Well i guess the dark ages are returning as there will be no history of it in the new socialist libraries. George Orwell was sure soot on but the future generations wont know of a book called 1984 because it will be to subversive to be allowed for the masses. Either the swamp gets drained or were headed to be a shi*hole country. Me crying is for my future grandchindren.
Are there any particular commodities books you recommend? Especially for someone trying to break into the field?
I’m away from my library right now, but the CBOT manual from the 80s at least was quite good. Also the book “Commodities Game” by Jones & Teweles -sort of the same thing, but better. “Merchants of Grain” is also interesting though dated (there is an alleged sequel by somebody else, but I haven’t read it yet). Once you get past the mechanics of how trades are done and storage works (the first two books), probably the main thing to understand is it’s all informational advantages by entrenched players (like in Merchants of Grain); that and various agricultural reports and fiddly information like what’s going on at NatGas delivery port A. For info advantages examples, for decades the guy who owned the oats markets was married to someone who was heiress to the Quaker Oats fortune. That kind of thing. I’m pretty sure something like Glencore is basically an intelligence agency gathering this kind of informaiton.
I had some very modest successes in softs as a signal processing problem, as they’re less subject to these forces or were anyway. There are other people who comment on here that are much more qualified than I am on various energy and aggies markets. I assume they all have weird microstructures; maybe some of them are still partially open outcry.
I’m one of the only ones who uses the physical books at our University library. I also like how each edition of the same textbook has its own quirks and aesthetic.
By the way, I’ve been thinking of the RNA memory stuff(thanks for that), and have a neat idea of how you would do it with GlycoRNA. By cutting them(or the sugar stuck to them) on the cell surface, you would shorten sugar chains, and modify the surface electricity.
I also assume this would be some repurposed immune system feature, so that might be a lead for what proteins to look for.
Forgetting could be simple rebuilding, and long term memory would be some sort of cap to prevent repair.
I dunno about any of this stuff and wish you luck in your research.
One of the most compelling arguments for the mrna memory idea to me was the time-scale. Like short term to long term memory time-scale looks sorta like transcription times or some related chemical process.
Have you encountered the new high temperature (as in boiling water) superconductor that Sukbae Lee, Seoul university, has discovered? Claims of Meisner effect levitation without cooling, measurements of critical fields, things like that. It looks like it might be real, and a lot of materials labs around the world are trying to replicate it.
LBNL had a theory paper claiming a plausible superconducting mechanism for the material. A university in China claims they’ve reproduced Meisner levitation with a tiny flake of the material.
Yes, so?
I dunno. I’m poking the experimental physicist to see what you might have to say.
(I can’t say I understand superconductivity or superfluidity very well myself at the moment, though I’m trying to fix that.) (Cooper pairs, okay, but why do these composite things get to ignore the lattice that their component electrons don’t?)
I’m not going to say anything; let them do the experiments. That’s how it works.
Nobody knows how high tc superconductors work.
I followed your link to an old blog post of yours about reading old journals from the Great Depression. You speak approvingly of Brad DeLong, but from what I can tell, he had no published books until 12 years after your post, and the link you provided is dead. Do you remember which works of his you recommended?
FYI he now favors “Medicare-for-all, funded by a carbon tax, with a whole bunch of Universal Basic Income rebates for the poor and public investment in green technologies . . . [as] [t]he world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last 10 or 15 years.” His pop history book is apparently a 600 page blowjob of Keynesian economics. Hardly someone I’d expect to have a harsh word for Mr. Roosevelt.
Use internet archive to figure out what I linked to. Probably his blog.
At LLNL the research “library” is little better than a discarded husk. Most of the stacks have gone digital. One has to query a crude interface to search through piles of questionable Springer publications just to find something remotely relevant. Only then can you request through interlibrary loan. My strategy has become browsing LibGen in my free time and printing chapters. The joy of unintentional discovery is lost.
“and since I no longer live in an English speaking country”
If you’re living in Europe I would like to invite you a (German/Czech) beer
Thats one passionate article. I suspect with passing of this generation of Lovers of ‘physical’ libraries, no one is going to miss them.
Solution probably lies in ‘digitising’ all, from ancient to present. A daunting task, but with so many tools available, maybe not impossible. ust my 2 cents.
“I can remember Bertrand Russell telling me of a horrible dream. He was in the top floor of the University Library, about A.D. 2100 . A library assistant was going round the shelves carrying an enormous bucket, taking down books, glancing at them, restoring them to the shelves or dumping them into the bucket. At last he came to three large volumes which Russell could recognize as the last surviving copy of Principia Mathe- matica. He took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled for a moment by the curious symbolism, closed the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated….”
I’ve had this long-lasting pipe dream of founding my own store for used books. With the current generation of zoomers i’m starting to feel that even living on neetbux is a more sensible career choice.
Sell them online first; that’s where most of the returns come from according to every bookstore owner I’ve met.
I used to buy second-hand books online but I have more or less given up now, I’ve been sold too many books described as Very Good which turn out to be damp and fusty, sometimes chokingly so, because the online bookstore was someone’s unheated garage or stables. Selling point for an online bookstore: please give details of the environment (temperature/ humidity) in which books are stored.
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