Love in the library

[austin_dern]

All right! One of the few things I really dislike about Singapore is the poor selection of used books, and that's generally fair enough. There aren't old enough books, or a diverse enough selection, for my tastes; I want things on the order of warehouses with stuff at one dollar or less. But there are exceptions -- particularly, in the little ``sidewalk sale'' type shops that come and go with festivals and student activities fairs and such. Those are variable, sure, but when they pay off, they pay off big. This week's big payoff was in a wide selection of the Life Science Library and Life Nature Library books -- boxes full of them, at an unmarked price (it turned out to be S4.00). That's just dozens of the 1960s/early 1970s world of science writing and photography.

After forcibly restraining myself, I got Giant Molecules (which demonstrats hoisting safes by a drop of cyanoacrylate, a much needed task in the 60s), Mathematics (finally, I have a reproduction of the Nikolai Lobachevsky stamp), The Universe (which we learn is 13 billion years old), Time (where we learn the universe is ``ten to fifteen'' billion years old), Planets (Venus might be too hot for water even at the poles), and Man and Space (updated to include Apollo 11 results). Joking aside this is nostalgic joy with some generally top-notch exposition. I didn't learn science and mathematics from these particular books, but I did from books much like these, and it's joy to catch part of childhood.

Trivia: Voyager 2 discovered ten moons around Uranus. Source: ``Uranus: Voyager Visits a Dark Planet,'' Rick Gore. National Geographic August 1986.

Currently Reading: Enter Jeeves: 15 Early Stories, P G Wodehouse.

Comments

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

I have all told probably close to a dozen of those "Time-Life" books kicking around. My father had nearly a complete collection of at least four different sets of them: the "Nature Library", "Life Science Library", "The Emergance of Man", and, to my great amusement in retrospect, "The Home Repair and Improvement" series. Some of the ones I have are swiped survivors from the original sets, while others I've grabbed from thrift shops. (Where they're always dirt cheap,)

In some respects I think the most interesting ones I have are several "Nature Science Annuals" from between 1972 and 1977. One of them has an article describing how America is going metric before the end of the decade, including as evidence photos of two-liter soda bottles, and a workcrew outside Columbus, Ohio installing a freeway sign with kilometer markings on it. Ha! ;^>

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Ah! Do you have the title dealing with polymers? In particular, I recall a comparatively famous photo of a kitten on a slab of some wonderplastic, above an energetic bunsen flame, illustrating the very low thermal conductivity of the material.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

I don't remember that title, but somehow I'm vividly remembering that photo anyway.

One of the Science Library books, "The Mind", was a particularly rich source of memorable imagery, including a fascinating series of paintings of cats done by a person going insane. Of course, it also has this charming photo of two baboons fitted with transparent plastic scalps grooming each other. You gotta take the good with the bad, I suppose.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh! I'm pretty sure they had ``The Mind,'' although I didn't think to buy it. I'm less passionate about the biological side of things, apart from biochemistry in general.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah! Yes, that's ``Giant Molecules,'' and it's right here on page 155, a kitten sitting on a transparent plastic sheet (silicone compound RTV 615, says the caption), perched on a 2000-degrees-Celsius flame.

There's also a picture of a canary put inside a plastic-wrapped wire cage, dropped into an aquarium and looking up at the passing fish. It asserts the oxygen passing through the membrane is enough for life.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

My parents had a more irregular set of reference books collected from the 60s to early 80s, but that seems to have gone by the wayside since their Big Move a few years ago. There was something in the way they wrote information books in those days that they don't anymore. Mind, modern styles can be quite as good or better in some ways, but that doesn't mean I don't also miss the old ways of writing.

And there is something uniquely endearing about the Think Metric guidebooks, isn't there?

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Of course, I then had to avail myself of the infinite resources of the net, and check up on the current estimates for the age of the universe, which led me here (http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/age.html). An informative page, listing three primary methods - age of elements, of the oldest white dwarfs, and of the oldest star clusters - as well as offering up the amusing heading "Radioactive Dating of an Old Star", which suggests itself as something more suited to Access Hollywood or suchlike.

I read and enjoyed several of those titles myself, needless to say. Sadly, with all the subsequent moves, almost nothing of my library remains. (Hence my pleasure at finding the entire run of Tintin a little while back, augmenting my memories of times like leaving my first copy of Tintin and the Shooting Star out to dry on a tree branch in France during a roadside picnic)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I love the question of dating the universe. It's frustrating that there's not a bigger globular cluster close enough to earth that its distance can be made more precise by parallax, a method that doesn't leave much room for any sort of error. It'd be so wonderful to pin this down ... one of the many things we need warp drive for; we'd have such a better understanding of the universe with even one good observatory ten light-years away.

Most of my library's back in New Jersey, to my particular frustration when I'm thinking of a trivia point for the day. It's re-forming here, though; if I get another contract extension I'm going to have no choice but to move to SIngapore permanently, as otherwise it'll be too big to ever ship back ...

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness for being able to order on the internet..

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ordering online's lovely, but it doesn't match being able to wander around and pick something up without quite knowing what it is, and being able to buy it after taking a glimpse through.