Comments on: Serendipity

By: Norma

Norma — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 01:14:19 +0000

“I mentioned my tiny card collection.” Ahem. Those cards belong to the library. Give them back. They are not yours to collect.

By: JohnLopresti

JohnLopresti — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 21:08:45 +0000

This thread shows KH there is a lot of sociology in a book, a jotting of a gnarled youth ungainly striving to become the real self a parent had hoped would develop. Consoltion for Melissa: we had 30,000 students; 30 from each class were allowed in the stacks; these were “general” stacks and beyond into the archive where the secret document of how the cesium clock itself was constructed were preserved. There the thesis your professor made a prior grad student write to justify the prof’s vision of unified field theory would languish flawed nobly documenting youth’s dutiful subservience to age. Admission: After much superfluous discovery among such tracts, one developed a better perspective of how the mouldering tomes in the reserved and private collection stacks developed, many only slightly expanding on the grad school experimentation. The beauty of the experience was how quickly the mind develops in the presence of the full collection and all the private alcoves hourlessly endlessly delving, as the contributor above observes serendipitously aggregated before your attention by some Dewey or Library of Congress schema. I dearly hope Microsoft and Google and the French government and all museum curators everywhere let the electronic version of this come into being, so our young exploring minds soon may campus-hop once one archive is exhausted and the next entices so beconingly.
In a denouement sometime, one realizes your own profs’ office and its private lending library quite loosely defined, contain some of the latest thinking. What google scanner will be allowed to examine the credenza, the planning documents from the obscure New England nonprofit, the JFK school of government compact-course role play negotiation.
It is best to create, simply make; your company will be all those authors, as we tend to think along the same channels and in the same worlds.

By: Melissa Byrd

Melissa Byrd — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 19:31:05 +0000

On a similar note, I work in a small, private liberal arts college. In the past few months, I’ve been weeding and cleaning the literature section of the stacks. I have found books signed by such people as Andrew Carnegie, Christopher Morley, Pearl Buck & Alice Glasgow. I am fascinated upon such discoveries! Just thinking that these people once held the same book and even signed it awes me. Of course, I’m a geeky bibliophile. But, I’m also horrified to think that these books have been sitting in the general stacks for anyone to take for years!

By: Stu

Stu — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 06:28:23 +0000

Holy crap! Meilander taught me Bioethics back in college at Valpo (from a very Christian standpoint, so we never really agreed on anything, even if he was nicer about it than me).

And it turns out he’s one degree of separation from Alito and Walter Kaufmann. Does this mean I’m three degrees of separation from Nietzsche? More importantly, does this mean that Scalia is three degrees of separation from Nietzsche as well? That would explain a lot.

By: Jack Stephens

Jack Stephens — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 05:38:45 +0000

I didn’t have my camera around to take a photo of the Alito card.Is it too late to find one and do so? I at least would appreciate an opportunity to see it.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 05:30:23 +0000

This reminds me of a story one of my grad school professors told me once. He attended Harvard in the early 70’s. One time he had to do a paper on some 17th century French historical figure. he checked the card catalog and found the the library had a copy of a biography of the man that had originally been published not long after he lived. So my professor went and found that book. It turned out to be a first edition that the library had acquired at the time of publication. A check of the back of the book showed that the last time it had been checked out was in 1775.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 01:58:19 +0000

It reminds me of lots of things, none of them pleasant.

Mmmm. Kool Aid.

By: joejoejoe

joejoejoe — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 01:45:36 +0000

This post reminds me of an essay by Nicholson Baker called “Discards” that covered a similar phenomenon in card catalogs. Librarians (and past browsers) would make serendipitous notes on the cards with quite of bit of information that had no place in a computerized search and was therefore discarded in the technology transfer. The cards at most libraries are destroyed after being computerized – even though the size and storage strongly hint at keeping them.

Baker supposed that if the card catalog itself was given a dewey decimal code they would have been seen as library materials themselves and cherished instead of destroyed.

By: Samuel Adams

Samuel Adams — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 23:40:42 +0000

Very interesting – This reminds me of a couple of things:

First, it reminds me of the well-rooted concerns about the Patriot Act (BTW—I hope the person who has this library card in her/his possession also has a warrant approved by the FISA court, otherwise the tool of Rove/Cheney, AKA, King George McChimpy BusHitlerHalliburton&Co., AKA The Illegitimate President, will send her/him to Gitmo).

Second, it reminds me of the illegal dumpster diving operation Chucky Schumer’s minions performed to get Michael Steele’s credit history.

Third, it reminds me of Democrats.com’s call to its readers to obtain the private phone records of prominent conservatives through shady online information brokers.

Fourth, it reminds me of Bill Moyers calling up J. Edgar Hoover and asking him to find some homosexual dirt on members of Barry Goldwater’s campaign staff.

It reminds me of lots of things, none of them pleasant.

By: Channon

Channon — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:58:03 +0000

Very interesting – This reminds me of I book I checked out about Michael Faraday, which had been donated by the physicist Arthur Holly Compton. Somebody had ripped out the part of the page where Compton had signed his name, treating it as an autograph.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:46:12 +0000

Great job of dumpster diving. Too back you didn’t find anything evil or nasty or whatever. Oh well, I’m sure you’ll be able to just make something up.

By: joel turnipseed

joel turnipseed — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:35:12 +0000

All I can say is: I’m absolutely jealous—and kicking myself for not thinking of such a thing. I worked at the U of MN library for two years in college—late 80s, when they were going through digitization—and never even thought (even though I supplemented my income at the time by book scouting) to look for library cards with Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, John Berryman, et. al… sadly, not so many famous philosophers there: Herbert Feigl? I was lucky enough to sit in on seminars with visitors such as G.E.M. Anscombe and Donald Davidson, but I doubt they were checking out books.

Great post—and even greater coup.

By: MQ

MQ — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 18:47:14 +0000

What an absolutely fantastic and original academic geek hobby! So much more ivory tower than the non-academic geek stuff of collecting comic books and so forth. Also tailor made for sociologists’ interests in network theory.

By: Bro. Bartleby

Bro. Bartleby — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 18:18:02 +0000

Bro. John,
Alas, we have yet to crack the nut of the Toronto school of Canadian philosophers, for we are still working on the Epicurean paradox. I’m afraid the monastery is not a place for the fleet of mind, for many of us are forever stuck in the moment, with little inclination or want for the past or the future (relatively speaking, that is).
Bro. Bartleby

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 17:23:58 +0000

Just to be clear, the photo above is of a different card (for a French work on induction and experimentation) from the one with Alito’s stamp on it. I took a photo of it in 2002 when I wrote the original post. I didn’t have my camera around to take a photo of the Alito card.