To: Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, 1835, and the other German works of PT 2XXX
Dear Werke:
I am sorry I had to take you from the shelves, in all 12 volumes of beautiful cracking covers and yellowing paper. Apparently your lack of barcode signaled that no one had checked you out in almost 20 years. I am not a rare book expert, but I am pretty sure, given the death of Schiller in 1805, you are a first or second edition.
To the rest of you, some of you are even older than the Schiller and some of you are relatively new scholarly works that have obviously not been opened once since you were purchased. Some of you were donations in memory, ex libris Professor Long-Since-Passed-Away.
Most likely none of you will ever be read again.*
Sincerely,
Steven
- Quoting Steven’s new supervisor in charge of the logistics of moving things to the up-town storage facility: “If we do our jobs correctly, hopefully no more than 3% of all these works will ever be requested again.”
Well at least they’re being honest that these works aren’t being used.
January 16th, 2007, at 10:19 pm #S.G.,
I came to your blog after noticing you shared my link to the ‘Commentators on Aristotle’ entry from Stanford’s Encyclopedia on del.icio.us. [a wonderfully helpful bibliography on the subject] Your post above on Schiller’s 1835 Werke intrigues me, is the following link consistent with the volumes you moved up-town:
http://www.google.com/books?vid=OCLC34327871&id=Is2TxxtszikC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=Werke+schiller&as_brr=1#PPP14,M1
P.S. I answered a remote reference question yesterday from a UToronto PhD book historian regarding a letter of ‘Caspar Hedio to Capito’ mentioned in de Ricci’s Census.
Is this what digital libraries are all about?
Enjoy your werke, Thomas.
February 8th, 2007, at 12:14 pm #It is entirely possible that that is the set that we sent into storage. Great that Google has the book, but for a bibliophile, poor that it is missing the rotting leather and the yellowing pages.
Toronto has a nice Book History/Print Culture program which I had been flirting with for a semester until I recently dropped it. I did get the opportunity to look at some manuscripts in the relevant class. I left because I was more concerned with the form of the book and its influence on communication, but it was a very interesting class.
I enjoy your del.icio.us posts, they are often philosophical and philosophy is my first love.
February 8th, 2007, at 2:00 pm #