Of Shoestrings and Aliens
Shopping for used books today is nothing like it was.
There are Web sites that aggregate the offerings of hundreds of bookstores. You can search across the U.S., maybe further, with your fingertips instead of your feet.
Better yet, you can tell a robot what your're looking for, and instruct the robot to e-mail you when a fresh copy of the book turns up on some bookseller's virtual shelf. If you're like me, you can lurk for months or years waiting for a copy of a usually-overpriced tome to appear at a price you're willing to pay.
Last week, two different books I'd been hunting for years both popped up; both, to my delight, arrived yesterday.
One is Living on a Shoestring: A Scrounge Manual for the Hobbyist by the late George M. Ewing.
Jeff Duntemann called this book "a Ewing brain dump on how to do more with less and repurpose what you and I might call junk into the raw materials of a comfortable (if eccentric) life. It’s as close to a memoir as we’ll ever have, as those who knew him will attest. He was always doing this stuff, and developed a sense for outside-the-box make-do technology that served him well both personally and in his fiction."
George wrote science fiction and, for computer and ham radio magazines, nonfiction; this was his only book. Living on a Shoestring was published in 1983, not long before Wayne Green Books ceased to exist, so there were never many copies sold, and used copies are only rarely seen. I read a borrowed copy not long after it came out (the binding was absolutely terrible and pages were threatening to fall out) and have always wanted my own. Fortunately, it seems to have retained its pages. I'd forgotten how nicely the goofy illustrations by Roger Goode enhance George's text. I miss George; re-reading this will probably make me miss him even more.
The second book is Plurality of Worlds: The Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant by Steven J. Dick, published in 1984.
One often sees science articles that say something like "For centuries humans have looked up at the stars and wondered whether other beings might exist up there..."
Dick will tell you exactly who wondered, when they wondered, where they wondered, and what they wondered about.
I've often come across references to this book. In a kind of intellectual tag-team game, Steven Dick's friend Michael Crowe-- from whom I took a very enjoyable class at Notre Dame-- wrote The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900 in 1988. Then Dick wrote The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science. I've found these two books to be very valuable. So I have long wanted to read Plurality of Worlds, but it's not in many libraries, and the available used copies tend to be expensive.
I'll enjoy the ritual of retiring these titles from my search list at Abebooks after many years. Now if I could just replace my photocopy-from-microfilm of John D. Clark's Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants with a reasonably-priced hardcover...
There are Web sites that aggregate the offerings of hundreds of bookstores. You can search across the U.S., maybe further, with your fingertips instead of your feet.
Better yet, you can tell a robot what your're looking for, and instruct the robot to e-mail you when a fresh copy of the book turns up on some bookseller's virtual shelf. If you're like me, you can lurk for months or years waiting for a copy of a usually-overpriced tome to appear at a price you're willing to pay.
Last week, two different books I'd been hunting for years both popped up; both, to my delight, arrived yesterday.
One is Living on a Shoestring: A Scrounge Manual for the Hobbyist by the late George M. Ewing.
Jeff Duntemann called this book "a Ewing brain dump on how to do more with less and repurpose what you and I might call junk into the raw materials of a comfortable (if eccentric) life. It’s as close to a memoir as we’ll ever have, as those who knew him will attest. He was always doing this stuff, and developed a sense for outside-the-box make-do technology that served him well both personally and in his fiction."
George wrote science fiction and, for computer and ham radio magazines, nonfiction; this was his only book. Living on a Shoestring was published in 1983, not long before Wayne Green Books ceased to exist, so there were never many copies sold, and used copies are only rarely seen. I read a borrowed copy not long after it came out (the binding was absolutely terrible and pages were threatening to fall out) and have always wanted my own. Fortunately, it seems to have retained its pages. I'd forgotten how nicely the goofy illustrations by Roger Goode enhance George's text. I miss George; re-reading this will probably make me miss him even more.
The second book is Plurality of Worlds: The Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant by Steven J. Dick, published in 1984.
One often sees science articles that say something like "For centuries humans have looked up at the stars and wondered whether other beings might exist up there..."
Dick will tell you exactly who wondered, when they wondered, where they wondered, and what they wondered about.
I've often come across references to this book. In a kind of intellectual tag-team game, Steven Dick's friend Michael Crowe-- from whom I took a very enjoyable class at Notre Dame-- wrote The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900 in 1988. Then Dick wrote The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science. I've found these two books to be very valuable. So I have long wanted to read Plurality of Worlds, but it's not in many libraries, and the available used copies tend to be expensive.
I'll enjoy the ritual of retiring these titles from my search list at Abebooks after many years. Now if I could just replace my photocopy-from-microfilm of John D. Clark's Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants with a reasonably-priced hardcover...