000 Computer Science, Knowledge & Systems, Part 3

For my third installment in the ooos, I would like to feature two books by revisiting 002. After all, I may not be in such a friendly territory (books about the book/book collecting) for awhile depending where Books by the Numbers wanders next. Both books could be classed at 381 with other forms of commerce (they are both about book selling), but I think they will find their readers better among works about the book, and so they have been kept at 002.

The first, a shorter book, is the charming The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop : a Memoir, a History (002 BU) by Lewis Buzbee. It is truly a book lover's delight. Here, in 200 small pages, Buzbee offers a paean to the bookseller's trade. He details his career working in progressively larger bookstores in California in his young adulthood and his career as a sales rep for a publisher. All of this is intertwined with vignettes on the history of the book and book selling throughout. What emerges from the efficient prose is a concise, yet comprehensive treatise on how the profession of book seller has evolved over the century and on the rapidly changing nature of the business during the last quarter century.

It is also interesting to note a connection with the subject matter some of the other books featured in this division. The place Buzbee cuts his teeth in his first bookstores was Palo Alto, California, which was a very central location in the development of the PC. Indeed, one of the big successes of Printers Inc., Buzbee's most fondly remembered bookstores, was their extensive and timely collection of computer books when the boom hit.

The second book, Old Books, Rare Friends (002 RO), was written by two women, Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern who enjoyed an extraordinary friendship of almost 70 years, and who had been in business for around 50 years together as dealers in antiquarian and rare books. What has set their careers apart from others in the trade, aside from their longevity and enduring--and it is noted platonic--friendship, has been their propensity for literary detective work, "sleuthing," as they are fond of referring to it.

The bit of sleuthing that made the duo famous was there discovery that Louisa May Alcott, well known author of Little Women (JF AL) and other classic children's books also wrote under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard a number of lurid "blood-and-thunder" tales. The library holds one volume of these collected stories, Behind a Mask: the Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (F AL).

Between the two books, I think The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop has a more broad appeal, though both have appeal to book lovers. Old Books, Rare Friends might turn some people off because the writing style of the two ladies is more of a turn-of-the-20th century style. Still, for me, this makes for a meatier bone and all the more timeless, but you need to consider who is writing this blog. After all, Leona is quoted in Old Books, Rare Friends as having said: "To librarians, booksellers, and collectors there is nothing limited in the subject of Books about Books."

000 Computer Science, Knowledge & Systems, Part 2

For my next entry I would like to feature two computer-related titles, The Road Ahead by Bill Gates (004.6 GA) and Electronic Brains : Stories From the Dawn of the Computer Age by Mike Hally (004 HA). For the first, even though it is from 1995 (older than most of the books I will be featuring), I feel somewhat compelled to feature a biography of such a well known person. He is such an eminent and iconic figure in the world for his success, wealth, and even his philanthropy this past decade. This is his only autobiography I know of.

Early in the book, Gates touches on the origins of the PC, which is a really fascinating story. I have heard it told elsewhere, but it was really interesting to hear his version of it. He points out the mistakes and missed opportunities that were made by other major players, and where fate could have turned out differently and made his company a mere footnote in the development of the PC.

But, history turning out as it did, Bill Gates' company, the venerable Microsoft, turned out to be a major force in the evolution of the PC. Gates took advantage of his opportunities at every turn. Equal parts computer whiz kid and astute businessman, Gates quit Harvard upon seeing an Altair 8800 computer on the cover of a Popular Electronics magazine. He and friend Paul Allen formed their software company, Micro-soft to write software for the Altair. The rest, as they say, is history.

There is more history gone over in the book given as an enjoyable narrative. The latter half of the book, though, tends to drag a little because Gates spends a lot of space speculating on the future of the computer and software. Now, given that it is Bill Gates doing the speculating, it is very authoritative, but it cannot help but come across as "in the future, you will get to work in a flying car" sort of talk. All that aside, and with a dozen years of hindsight, I have to say that Gates really had his finger on the pulse of his industry--or maybe it was his hands on the reins!

The book, Electronic Brains : Stories From the Dawn of the Computer Age deals with entirely different epoch in the history of the computer: its Stone Age. The book came out of a BBC radio series on the topic, and was able to go into much more depth on the topic. All in all, the book emulates the sort of quality you would expect from a BBC production.

The work highlights a number of pioneering efforts around the globe working to develop computers between the late '30s and late '50s. What I ended up liking about the book, was that it did not seek the crown the "father of the computer." Rather, the book laid out the accomplishments and the time frame they occurred in and left it largely up to the reader who should be considered the computer pioneer, or if this was even a relevant title.

There is at least a small amount of local pride knowing that probably the earliest candidate for the first electronic computer was built in the basement of a physics building at Iowa State College in 1939 in two men's spare time. It then sat untouched for nearly a decade and was later dismantled.

Interestingly, the word, computer, or spelled computor, seems to have most often referred to the women mathematicians who tended to the early machines as they calculated the ballistic trajectory tables of the guns used in and around World War II. The development of the machines received a boost from the war owing to the large amount of new weapons needing ballistic tables drawn up.

The technology that was spawned out of these early pioneer's efforts has become so pervasive in our everyday lives that it has been fascinating to take a look back at those times. Electronic Brains is an excellent non-fiction read for anybody because it is not bogged down in technical jargon and has wonderful resources at the back of the book for those wanting to do additional reading in the field. The length of the book is also very manageable. Highly recommended!

000 Computer Science, Knowledge & Systems Intro

For the first entry in my new blog, Books by the Numbers, I have decided to start at the start: the 000s. I am not considering myself locked into tackling the numbers in order, but I deem this as good a place as any to start out. The 000s is indeed a diverse division, having subjects ranging from the Loch Ness Monster to computer programming to book collecting. It is also contains some of the most quickly dating material in the collection.

For instance, we recently withdrew a book titled The Internet for Dummies, 7th ed. copyrighted 2000 (004.67 LE). Then, I found the 1st ed. from 1993 classed at 384.3 (in 1993, the librarians probably did not know what to do with it), and I withdrew it as well. The latter book, while being an introductory text to the Internet in 1993, would no doubt bewilder people who today use the Internet quite regularly. Things have changed so much in the past 15 years! This illustrates why it is such a challenge for librarians to keep their computer books up-to-date.

A listing of the newest selections from this area in the Emmetsburg Public Library prove that we are trying to meet this challenge. They are: Amp Your MySpace Page: Essential Tools for Giving Your Profile an Extreme Makeover (006.7 BU), How to do Everything With YouTube (006.7 FA), and How to do Everything With Podcasting (006.7 HO). In the Young Adult section we have The Rough Guide to MySpace & Other Online Communities (YA 004.69 BU). Each of these books deals with a different Internet-based computer application that is currently popular.

While the computer manuals are a very popular group of materials and very current in their area of study, other books classed in the 000s enjoy a more ephemeral popularity. These are works of controversial knowledge, and they include: Into the Bermuda Triangle : Pursuing the Truth Behind the World's Greatest Mystery (001.94 QU), Atlantis and the Lost Lands (001.94 ST), and The Secret Power of Pyramids (001.94 AK). We also have a set of reference books from the Marshall Cavendish Company called The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time (001.9 UN).

Each month, I will be featuring several books I find to be engaging reads. Rather than how-to-manuals or books that merely lay out the facts, these are non-fiction books that tell a good story.

My first featured read is Aaron Lansky's Outwitting History: the Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books (002.075 LA). No, this is not a story set in the Holocaust pitting a compassionate Gentile librarian shepherding Yiddish books across the border into safety under the noses of Nazi book-burners. Rather, Aaron Lansky was Jewish graduate student in 1980 when he dedicated himself towards preserving the Yiddish language in books.

So, why did Yiddish need saving in 1980, 35 years after the Holocaust? As it turns out, Yiddish, by that time, had become something of an orphan language. Hebrew was the language spoken in Israel. Jewish European immigrants to America were formerly a significant population of Yiddish speakers, but they had largely failed to pass on the language to their children. The Jews that remained in Europe became the victims of the Nazis, Stalin, and other anti-Semitic forces.

Lansky's efforts met with some apathy at first, but the book is chock full of stories of individuals who had kept their cherished Yiddish books for decades and then passed them on to Lansky's National Yiddish Book Center when they had to move on to a nursing home or before.

The book is wonderfully peppered with Yiddish phrases, which are always translated. If you know a bit of German, though, they are a special linguistic delight, for the languages share much in common.

The rather rollicking story of the group of Lansky and his zamlers (book collectors) makes an excellent can't-put-it-down read that can easily be digested in a few sittings. Anyone who has a love for books should fall in love with the man, Lansky, and his cause.

Welcome to Books by the Numbers!

Hello all! My name is Nathan Clark, the library director of the Emmetsburg Public Library. Welcome to my new blog about engaging non-fiction reads, Books by the Numbers. Each week I will feature a set of recommended reading by the numbers. Which numbers you ask? The numbers on the spines of our books--the Dewey Decimal numbers--of course!

Each month I will be focusing on the works in the Emmetsburg Public Library that have been assigned one of the 100 Dewey divisions. Many of these divisions are so broad that they will require several entries to feature them. Given that, and the fact that I may take a week off now and then, I think I will have fodder for blogging for a long time to come.

For each division, I will try to do each of the following:

1. Provide descriptions of each division discussed.

2. Provide examples of "classics" commonly assigned numbers within that division.

3. Feature 3-5 books, usually somewhat new, that I deem to be interesting and engaging reads.

4. Provide local call numbers of all books mentioned for people to find them in the Emmetsburg Public Library.

5. Provide comparable Library of Congress Classification for the books discussed to help in finding similar resources in other libraries (ILCC, with whom we share a space, classifies its books with this system).

I look forward to delving into the stacks of books, especially in places where I do not normally look. I know that I am bound to find some very pleasant surprises, and I hope that my readers will, too. Please stay tuned!