Adding and subtracting

We have too many books, but sometimes we add more.

We’ve mentioned our consultant with the large library before.  He definitely has too many books, at least considering the size of his apartment.  But, somewhat shamefacedly, he admits that in the last month he’s added six more.

In his own defense, he asserts that his visit to the used-book shop on Capitol Hill was in support of a book our astronomer is contemplating writing; he was hoping to find popular-astronomy books of a certain period.  Of course he did not find them.  He did, however, come up with four of good (one might say outstanding) quality, for which he had been on the lookout for some time: essays by George Orwell; a biography of Stalin; the Homeric Hymns, to complement his other Ancient Greek translations; and The Good Earth.  He at least should get credit (he says) for a good geographic spread: China, Russia, Greece and the British Empire.

Then there was an estate sale on the next block, which included an extensive library of hardbound books of high quality.  Quite a few were nineteenth-century publications.  He picked up Prescott’s Conquest of Peru, which is not only a respectable work of history, but fills out his Prescott: he inherited Ferdinand and Isabella and Conquest of Mexico from his grandfather.  He also bought a mid-century collection of essays on science from several authors.  He is not actually an avid science historian of the period, but one of the authors is Michael Faraday, who could make six interesting and informative lectures from a candle flame.

Well, adding brings up the necessity for subtracting.  We are all facing the fact that the textbooks we have learned and taught from are now dated.  For mathematics and introductory science works the problem is not great.  Calculus is still what it was; the inclined plane, Gaussian surface and structure of cyclopropane haven’t changed.  But the astronomy texts need the last few chapters rewritten and added to, and their illustrations seem now almost quaint.  Beyond the textbooks, conference proceedings and monographs on the state of this or that sub-topic are now completely superseded.  For the next decades they will fall into that uninteresting gap between being useful for research and being useful for historians.  We’d be happy to give them to anyone who would take them, but simply recycling the paper is hard for us to contemplate.

Well, we’ll figure out what to keep and what to get rid of.  A separate question is finding the time to read what we have.