Every Library Has a Story to Tell | Hacker News Reader

Every Library Has a Story to Tell

atlasobscura.com

63 pointsdiodorus22 comments

Sometime during year one at my university I was wandering the stacks, pulling books out at random to see what kinda stuff there was. It was 7 stories of stacks, including the basement which had these crazy moving shelves.

At one point I'm at a shelf and pulling out thin volumes with titles like (remembering poorly) "Shift calculations of blah blah style concrete," "weather effects on bloo blee cement," "compression formulas for heehaw company concrete," and so on. Book after book. Next shelf, same thing, entire volumes of concrete and cement research and data. All with different titles, different content, different authors.

As I moved down more I realized the entire row was books on concrete. How? was all I could wonder. How could there possibly be this much published information on concrete? Who dedicated significant amount of time to compile research, stick it in a thin volume, and then have it placed among a thousand others? What librarian chose these books?

I had a mild plan when going into college of reading a whole lot of everything I could get my hands on, but it was only then that I really grasped just how much information is available to mankind. It's truly unassailable. (probably relates well to the other article on the front page right now about the last man to know everything)

Oh man this makes me nostalgic.

Had a similar experience while taking a break from studying. Picked a random row of books only to realize it was entirely dedicated to genital reconstruction and sex-changes. Being in college, my curiosity was piqued. I may never unsee some of the pictures in those books.

Edit: Spelling

I'm sorry your curiosity declined after college.

piqued?

"The number of books is infinite." -Joseph Joubert

Every time I think about writing a book, I question whether I could write anything that I didn't learn from better books already. Looks unlikely.

I don't know you, but the same is true for nearly anything you could create. Software included. The difference is, you go out of the way to fill whatever gap is unfilled. Maybe you'll never be able to write a better Young Girl Becomes Werewolf As Metaphor For Growing Up YA Novel, but perhaps your happens to have a main character that not only is Young Girl Becomes Werewolf, but Young Girl With Problem Burping That Becomes Werewolf, and that connects just right to a certain group of people that never knew they needed this particular book.

Same for weird little dumb tools/libraries you could publish on github, songs you could write, etc.

Concrete is the most pervasive man made material on the planet. And it likely will be so for centuries. It’s a wonder there aren’t more books on concrete.

It is depressing to realize that there is such a vast amount of interesting content out there, and I will only be able to experience a tiny fraction of it.

"Art is long and time is fleeting" - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in A Psalm of Life, itself an allusion to an ancient Greek aphorism[0]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis#Transla...

A security guard at one of my employers had retired from a concrete contracting business.

He was an interesting fellow to talk with, when I'd be coming or going from the building off-hours.

I bet some of those books make pretty good reading. Like some of the older tech references I recall in the IS field. Told you what was really going on, and how to get stuff done with it.

Judging by recent casual reads on infrastructure costs, probably very lucrative information in the correct markets too.

My friends in undergrad Civil Engineering had 300-page textbooks on concrete.

I found a whole shelf of binders detailing the research conducted for a nuclear power plant proposal in the area. It went down to things like how many of each kind of wild animal and fish have been spotted and detailed weather instrument data. Binders upon binders of the stuff.

Here's a few pictures of Manguel's old library: https://thesleeplessreader.com/2012/09/24/the-library-at-nig...

It doesn't look like 35k books. Must be very efficiently stacked in there.

Very efficient indeed! I would guess the wide bottom shelves hold double rows at least. If I use my own meagre collection of not even 1000 books as a guide, I would estimate that that room can hold about 20000 books if used as efficiently as possible.

That room looks blissfully comfortable.

"I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library." But also consider being on a deserted island with a library of all the books ever written (including manuscripts, etc.) and the lifespan to read it all: it's both an exhilarating and frightening thought. The library as a prison of the mind, trapped in other people's thoughts. For a writer the best book is the unwritten one, e.g. the blank book that Winston Smith cherishes in 1984.

That sounds like Borges' Library of Babel.

Manguel's The Library of Night is worth a look, as is The Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet. And if you go to the University of Chicago Press web site, the month's free ebook is The Palace of Books by Roger Grenier.

UCP's monthly free ebook page http://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html

Thanks for the link, I jumped at this, but, alas, they require one to create an Adobe ID and use Adobe Digital Editions.

Yes, I haven't got around to reading it. Oh, well.

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