Old friends

The blog has been a bit quiet over the last few weeks. The reason is in part because we are downsizing. We are moving from a fairly large house we bought in the early 1990s when such houses were affordable, into an apartment about half the size. As a consequence of this downsizing we have to get rid of a lot of stuff and some of this stuff which has to go, consists of books. We have already taken four carloads of books over to Lifeline in the hope that they can give others as much joy, interest and inspiration as we received from them. For books bought and read in recent years, that is not too difficult but for books we have had for decades, loading them into the boot of a car is not an easy task. It is emotionally difficult as they are like old friends, and I expect when we do move into the apartment we will have to find space for them which we hadn’t anticipated we would need.

Those books are mostly for recreational reading or for information which was only obtainable via books before the advent of online encyclopaedias, dictionaries in English and other languages (especially for me, Chinese and Russian) and Wikipedia. However, for me that was just the tip of a pretty large iceberg. My game of palaeontology is a science which is in some aspects, precedence-oriented (i.e. it matters what someone said about a particular fossil genus back in 1946). Having spread myself around various topics over the years I had accumulated a fairly substantial ‘professional library’. I measured it up some years ago and it came to 50 metres of shelf space, and comprised books, reprints, monographs (from series), journal runs, and photocopies*. It used to be that when someone published a paper which was of interest to you, rather than simply going to the library every time you wanted to access it, you would send them a ‘reprint request’, which was essentially a postcard on which you filled out their address and the title of the paper which you were requesting. In those days, scientific journals would usually give the author of a paper they published, about 50 free copies of their single paper as ‘reprints’. Upon receiving your postcard, if the author had any of these reprints left, they would post one to you. When it arrived, I would stick it in a pamphlet box, alphabetically arranged by author’s surname. That is mostly how I accumulated such a large professional library. 

The snail-mail method of obtaining others’ published works is well and truly gone, with the advent of the PDF. I now have some 5,000 PDFs of papers and books on my computer and on ‘the cloud’, where they are electronically stored in some huge computer server somewhere. This is so if my computer carks it, I still have access to all this knowledge.

The one remaining problem I have is that so many of the accumulated reprints have written greetings on them, and some are from former supervisors, former colleagues, and some are from the greats of the profession now long dead, and it is impossible for me to part with them. We might need another couple of bookshelves in the new place!

*I occasionally borrowed Russian books via interlibrary loan. They came from the Lenin Library in Moscow and I stood by the photocopier for an hour or so, sometimes photocopying the whole book before it was returned to Moscow. From memory, when I was a student, it cost me 5 cents per page. So, a 200 page book would cost me about $10, and given that my weekly scholarship was about $80, it wasn’t cheap. Those photocopies were hole-punched and bound with an Arnos-clip (do they still exist?). When I went to Russia in the early 1990s I came back with a barrel-bag full of books given to me by people I visited. When I left Moscow, the bag was so heavy I could barely lift it. That bag cost me $700 in excess baggage (i.e. again about $10 per book). Some of those books replaced some of the old expensive photocopies.