Unpacking My Library

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not touched by the mild boredom of order. (Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library") Heyerdahl and Homer in one of the "H" boxes, Schleiermacher and Schopenhauer in the "S' box. Opening these boxes immediately made my office smell like a used book store.

London Library

Ben very nicely showed me around the London Library last weekend. A great place to get lost in the stacks.

The Book I Read

"The Book I Read" bookcase by Anzfer Farms. Photo by Joe.

Box of Philosophy Books

As mentioned before, I packed up all but one box of philosophy books that I anticipate using this year. For a couple of days I was irrationally afraid that it was lost in the mail, but it finally arrived.

Library Fines

I'm closing out my account with the Regenstein Library, returning all my books and paying my fines. I just found the following letter I received from the library a couple of years ago:

"Hello - I have had the opportunity to look over your fine appeals;
let me say that they were articulate and humorous. My problem
is in September of 2005 you had $72 in fines waived; in January
of 2006, we waived $87 in fines. Now you want us to waive $102,
or $261 in roughly a year.

The purpose of a fines are to encourage, if that's the word, people
to comply with library regulations, especially as they pertain to
books other borrowers need. We occasionally waive fines because
we believe that the borrower will not get him/herself in a similar
situation. In fact, it seems that each time you appeal fines,
the amount is larger ($72 - $87 - $102).

So, I am not willing to waive these fines. If you wish to appeal
my decision, please contact [so and so], who is the Head of
Access Services.

Sincerely yours..."

I'm happy to pay the remaining fines--I agree completely with the "Dedicatory Epistle" in James Redfield's Nature and Culture in the Iliad:

The Regenstein Library is very large, very expensive, and it works. Probably no environment better adapted to the activity of scholarship has ever been created. In this library much that had been impossible becomes possible, and much that had been difficult becomes easy.

A Restorative Weekend in Palm Springs

Palm Springs still has some of this kind of feel.

Plato: Complete Works

I sat in on a couple philosophy classes today to take some pictures for the department website. This is from Agnes's Weakness of the Will class.

Batavus Old Dutch

Tati Cycles loaned me this bike while mine is being built. I'm really enjoying cruising around HP on this thing, and after only two outings I have received three positive, spontaneous remarks from passersby about the bike. But the Batavus Old Dutch weighs about 45 pounds, which is far too much to comfortably carry up three flights of stairs.

Mother Goose in California

My dad has just published a new book. It's an alphabet book that takes classic mother goose rhymes and illustrates them using California landmarks, activities, and native flora and fauna. Every page is densely detailed and repays close scrutiny. For example, on the page for letter V, which shows a cozy rabbit family in a firelit cabin, the constellations in the upper corners are Canis Major and Orion---the domestic life of the rabbits is subtly shadowed by two threats, the dog and the hunter.

The book combines dad's attention to detail, his whimsical appreciation of nature, and his love of the local. It's fantastic.

Buy a copy from Heyday or from Amazon.

Here's a video of dad talking about the book.

The Great University of Chicago Press Booksale

University of Chicago Press is selling off a bunch of its surplus stock. I was hoping to find big stacks of Midway Reprints of Carnap, but no luck. The best thing there was a box filled with Ted Cohen's Jokes book.

Santa Monica: Hennessey + Ingalls Bookstore

Just a few blocks from the beach, and one block from the Third Street Promenade is Hennessey + Ingalls art and architecture bookstore. H+I is not only the best specialty art bookstore I've ever seen (far better than any museum bookstore, and about 50 times better than Blackwells Art Bookshop in Oxford), it is the bookstore that is most fun to browse, without qualification. I would make an effort to come here every time I go to Los Angeles just to flip through their copy of Candida Höfer's Libraries.

As important as the enormous range of art books they have to the pleasant browsing experience is H+I's knowledgeable staff. When I asked if they had a copy of Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the guy behind the counter pointed out that not only did they not have it, but that a copy would cost me several thousand dollars. Obviously that wasn't what I was looking for, though he said they used to "always have a copy in stock". I was actually looking for Ruscha's Then and Now, but couldn't remember the title. He quickly identified what I was after and opened up a sealed copy for me to browse.

Zed recently reminded me that in Michael Mann's Heat, Robert DeNiro's character buys a book on metallurgy at H+I.

And you can walk to H+I from Father's Office after having a hamburger.

Related: You can read my assessment of the relative virtues of the best academic bookstores here.

Scenes from Regenstein Library

Dark stacks on the fifth floor.

Chicago's brutalist main library.

Construction begins on the blister-shaped Mansueto library designed by Helmut Jahn.

Dan's Books

Dan showed us his impressive office in the Old Main building at Knox College last weekend. The fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate took place in front of the building in 1858. Now it's home to humanities offices and classrooms.

Dan said when he moved into the office, he inherited the entire Knox College philosophy library--the couple of shelves shown in the second picture from the top. If you look closely at those shelves you can see that they are clearly books from a collection assembled mostly in the 60s and 70s, like the books in the philosophy lounge at the University of Chicago, or the used books at Powell's. As Jay pointed out, having multiple copies of the Linguistic Turn is the clearest symptom of a collection from that era. Was there an upsurge of philosophy retirements in the 80s, or have professors stopped donating entire collections? Is there an impending wave of retirements that will bring small philosophy department libraries into the 80s and 90s?

I always look to see whether there are any noteworthy collisions of authors on people's shelves--thinkers whose work would normally never be taught together, or classified together in the Dewey decimal system, but who end up neighbors in a personal collection. I asked Dan if there were any such collisions that also expressed his interests. He pointed to the meeting of Varieties of Reference and Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks in the third picture above. I think the Du Bois-Truth and Other Enigmas combination on the same shelf is a close runner-up.

There were a lot of books on Dan's shelves that were obviously from Powell's. I asked him what his best used find was, and he pointed to the five volume Freud Collected Papers, which he got at the Newberry for $12.

Dan said that he's probably read the Investigations and Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung more times than any other books in the office. (You can see the Bangs book in the middle of the bottom shelf of the picture with the lamp, and the Investigations is clearly the center of attention on the Wittgenstein shelf in the second picture from the bottom.)

In the final picture, Dan shows off the color printing in §48 of his MacMillan edition of the Investigations.

When I asked Dan the question about what he's read the most, before he had a chance to reply, Jay, looking through Dan's books, pulled one out and said, "How about Jean-Luc Marion's Descartes' Metaphysical Prism?" Dan replied, "I've got it memorized".

Book Signing

Parag signs a big stack of his books, The Second World, for the Seminary Co-op.

The Second World

My good friend Parag wrote a book on geopolitics that's coming out this month. He was nice enough to give me an advance copy. I was surprised to see that the cover had been changed--an earlier version (which is still the cover that comes up on Goodreads) features a globe-themed rubik's cube. Parag said that they actually made that rubik's cube and he now owns it.

Myopic Books

Stumbled on a decent used bookstore while going to get my hair cut near the Damen el stop. Picked up a copy of the Dreyfus & Dreyfus Mind over Machine, which has been on my to-get list for a few years.

Oriental Institute Library

D.G. told me about this place in a comment on the previous post. The library is up on the second floor of the Oriental Institute. There's an Indiana Jones vibe up there--I walked past a couple of open offices stuffed with weird fetishes and piles of musty books. Maybe the Ark of the Covenant was up there.

The library was very pleasant. Quieter than the Div school library, with almost no traffic noise. The chairs were big wooden affairs, less comfy than the Div school but still conducive to study. I had a pleasant afternoon reading a couple chapters of Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science in here.

Battle of the Academic Bookstores: Arguments for and Against

Blackwell's is currently decorated with banners that declare it to be the "best bookstore in Britain since 1879". That's true, but how does it compare with the Seminary Co-op bookstore in Chicago? That question is slightly unfair, because the seminary Co-op does not carry the normal range of pulp fiction and celebrity cookbooks and sports biographies. The Seminary Co-op is a dedicated academic bookstore, where you can buy copies of Kant's Anthropology and Reclam editions of Kant and Hegel. So there's a couple of different questions to ask about the relative merits of Blackwell's and the Co-op:

(1) Which is the better academic bookstore?
(2) Counting the popular branch of the Co-op (57th street books), which is the better bookstore overall?

Blackwell's has two specialty bookstores across Broad Street from the main shop: an art and poster store, and a music store. I'll count both of those for the purposes of assessing both (1) and (2).

I think it is possible for a bookstore to be a good bookstore overall without being a good academic bookstore. And it's not just possible--it's actually the case that some bookstores are are good overall without being good academically. For example:

-Kramerbooks (D.C.)
-Qi (Oxford)

Both of these are very pleasant places to browse a limited, but thoughtfully chosen and entertainingly arranged selection of books. Both have attached cafes or bars.

To decide between Blackwell's and the Co-op in terms of general quality, features like the following will be important: pleasant atmosphere, a thoughtful selection of books, and arrangements of books that get me to buy things (or at least write things down to check out from the library) I didn't come in looking for.

The criteria for academic quality are different. Since I'm a philosophy student, I will concentrate on the philosophy sections and take them as representative of the academic collections as a whole. I just don't have enough experience with other sections to tell how the astronomy or political sociology or theology sections compare.

Here I will be concerned with a comparison solely in terms of academic quality.

Philosophy Section Size
Both Blackwell's and the Co-op have gigantic philosophy sections. My estimate is that they have nearly the same amount of shelf area devoted to the discipline.

Organization

Blackwell's

There are important differences in the way that Blackwell's and the Co-op organize their philosophy sections. Blackwell's enforces a de facto analytic-continental divide by organizing its philosophy books into subject areas. There are sections for philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, political philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of language and logic, and ethics. Then there are historical sections, roughly broken down by century, going up to the German Idealists. There is a whole wall of contemporary, or 20th century, European philosophy. That's where you will find all the Foucault and Derrida, as well as the Wittgenstein.

I find this arrangement annoying. Where should you look to find a book like Reasons and Persons? Metaphysics? No. Ethics. What about one of Dennett's books, like Freedom Evolves? Philosophy of science? Metaphysics? Philosophy of Mind? I haven't looked for that book in Blackwell's, but the point is that I wouldn't know immediately where to go. I think I remember seeing the two volumes of McDowell's essays in the philosophy of mind section. That seems odd. This arrangement also has the effect of putting books by the same author in different sections, so you can't, say, see everything they have by David Lewis or Charles Travis by looking in a single place.

One benefit of Blackwell's arrangement is that if you concentrate on a single section (philosophy of language, say), you very quickly spot new titles in that area. So, on my last visit, for example, I spotted two cool-looking new books I didn't know about beforehand: Max de Gaynesford's I and Michael Devitt's Ignorance of Language.

Another benefit is that the Blackwell Companions and Routledge Introductions, and other survey-ish books are separated out from the main sections and grouped together. Zed has complained before about how the Co-op doesn't do this (with the exception of the Cambridge Companions, which are organized together).

One idiosyncratic psychological effect that Blackwell's organization has on me is to make me depressed. I think this is caused by the feeling that I can't keep up with all the new material published in even a subdiscipline of philosophy.



Seminary Co-op

The Co-op has contrasting virtues and vices of organization.

It doesn't separate its philosophy section into areas of philosophy. So you can find McDowell pretty close to Malebranche. Though you do need to know that there is a separate cognitive science section, where you find most of the Dennett and Fodor and the Churchlands, a separate theology section, where all the Kierkegaard is, and a philosophy of science section where you have to go to find Kuhn. So with those exceptions, you can find all the works by an author grouped together--all the David Lewis, all the John Perry. Of course, there is still the problem of knowing where to look for a book like Bernard Williams's Descartes: under Williams, or under Descartes? But that's a general problem for all bookstores. (At the Hyde Park Powells, sometimes they handle this problem by putting one copy of, say, Karen Green's book on Dummett, in the K section and another copy in the D section.)

If you're looking for new books in your area of philosophy, you're pretty much at sea in the Co-op. When Tom Baldwin was visiting, we took him to the Co-op and that was his main complaint about the philosophy section. This strikes me as an expression of the interdisciplinarity championed at the U of C. Good in some ways (I don't get depressed going into the Co-op, looking at a single narrow section of philosophy), but bad in others (it is harder to keep on top of, and so be expert at, a single area).

There is a main table covered in new books of all kinds in the foyer of the Co-op, which is quickly browseable, but also not separated by subject area. Only a small portion of the new books out on the table will be philosophy.

New books at the Seminary Co-op.

Used Books

One substantial advantage that Blackwell's has over the Co-op is its used book section. It is obviously the destination for students to sell back their required reading, so they always have multiple copies, some nearly untouched, of commonly assigned books--lots of Descartes, introductions to logic, etc. I've also scored some pretty decent used books there: hardcover 1st editions of Zettel and The Blue and Brown Books, and a paperback copy of Bernard Williams's Descartes (which used to be hard to find, but has been recently reissued).

The Co-op doesn't have a used section, though Powells can be very good and is just a few blocks away. Though Powells doesn't have as much turnover as the used section at Blackwell's.

Other remarks

Though I'm not as familiar with some of the other sections of these bookstores, I do have a sense that the film section at the Co-op is vastly superior to the film selection at Blackwell's.

The film section at the Co-op

Atmosphere

This is the most response-dependent way of comparing these bookstores, but I prefer the utilitarian, bomb shelter feel of the Co-op to the open and airy atmosphere of Blackwell's. The Co-op is singlemindedly devoted to its books--in the pictures above you can see how there is no space between the books and the ceiling. There is very little space taken up by signs or other displays. I also like that. The books are allowed to call attention to themselves. It encourages a feeling of intense study. The overhead pipes occasionally make a noise that sounds like the ceiling is going to collapse.

Blackwell's has an excellent cafe, where you can sit and read the Observer and have an espresso. The Co-op barely has enough room to squeeze by other customers. That, for whatever reason, adds to the charm of the Co-op as an academic bookstore.

Finally, the Co-op has the edge in hours of operation. Blackwell's closes at the ridiculously early time of 6pm on weekdays. The Co-op is open until 9.

Co-op hours of operation

Staff

My experience with the staff at Blackwell's has been mixed. Most of the time they know where stuff is, but they are never exceptionally friendly, and a few times they've pointed me in the wrong direction.

In contrast, the staff at the Co-op are exceptionally good--they know exactly where everything is, and are always willing to track things down for me, rather than just saying something like "I think it's in the music section". And they have even read, or at least looked through, some of the books they are selling. One guy who works at the Co-op pointed out this picture, buried in the middle of the recent H.L.A. Hart biography, to me while I was walking around browsing.

Summary

So, let me review the points in favor of each bookstore:

Size of collection: tie

Organization: Blackwell's gets a point for focus; the Co-op gets a point for avoiding parochialism

Used books: Blackwell's

Atmosphere: The Co-op

Hours: The Co-op

Staff: The Co-op

I therefore conclude that the best academic bookstore in the English speaking world is the Seminary Co-op.

Battle of the Academic Bookstores

What is the best academic bookstore in the English speaking world? Is it Blackwells in Oxford, or the Seminary Co-op in Hyde Park?

Blackwells.

The Seminary Co-op.

I've considered this question before, without coming to any decision. I just spent about a week hanging around Blackwells, and now I'm back in Chicago so I feel like I'm in a good position to settle this once and for all.

Reasons in favor of each in the next entry.

Norrington Room

The Norrington room in the basement of Blackwell's.

One virtue of the way the philosophy books are displayed in this room (by subject) is that you can easily spot new titles. I saw two new ones that looked good in the philosophy of language section:

1. Max de Gaynesford, I
2. Michael Devitt, Ignorance of Language