by George W. Houston

Get the book.

Oh, what fun! Houston carefully weighs the evidence for libraries and book collections in Ancient Rome. To be safe, he limits most of his study to a few places which we are absolutely certain were libraries. There are two building, one at Ephesus and the other at Timgad, where inscriptions still in place announce that this is The Library. There is one villa at Herculaneum in which hundreds of carbonized scrolls were found; we know that this was some sort of private library because we have (at least part of) the collection, most of which was found on the shelves of Room V but some of which was lying here and there about the house. We have two or three piles of papyrus from Oxyrhyncus in which a bunch of literary papyri seem to have been discarded together, and these seem to be the remains of libraries or private collections that were thrown out because they were no longer wanted, or perhaps because they had been copied to codex books and the scrolls were worn out. We have some pictures and sculptures of people reading and writing; Romans sat down to read, but while they liked to have a low table on hand for writing implements, candles and the like, they don’t seem to have used tables for either reading or writing. A really delightful book.

by R. H. Robins

Get the book.

Linguistics were crucial to establishing a role for computing in the humanities. During World War II, a Czech refugee, linguist Roman Jakobson, ran across Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics while studying in a program for French-speaking refugee professors set up at the New School. In that program, he recruited Claude Lévi-Strauss for a seminar on computing and the structure of things. That seminar transformed French, and eventually European, academe.

For my purposes, Robins’s short history leans a little too heavily in to Greece and Rome and hurries through the Twentieth Century, partly because Robins supposes that students will already know the recent ideas. Saussure gets about three pages, and that’s not really enough for me to follow. Still, this volume did what I asked it to do.

Another day at the library, because they were repaving our street today, and also demolishing the post office adjacent to Eastgate World Headquarters in Watertown, which was likely to be distracting.

At Swarthmore, we fantasized about how nice it would be to be able to just read, without all the classes and exams, papers and deadlines. That’s what these library days are like: ten hours of reading. History of linguistics? Check! Half of a recent book on how ancient libraries worked? Check! Chasing down the starting reference on the Tower of Babel? Well, that was a bit tricky.

I remember my Uncle Mike, an erudite fellow, showing us all his just-arrived first volume of the Anchor Bible. This edition of Genesis costs $50 from Amazon. What I need is the commentary on I.11 — the Tower of Babel. Naturally, Widener has it! Widener has everything. Except it has Malachi and Kings, but not Genesis. No worries: there’s a copy in Lamont! So I go over to Lamont, the undergraduate library. But my alumni ID doesn’t get me in to Lamont. I can order the book to be sent over to Widener, but that seems sort of a stretch. So I go back and find that the book is available electronically. But I have to read ebooks in the Hall Of Shame, the room that used to be the card catalog. Anyway, I grabbed the electronic copy; E. A. Speiser didn’t have much to say, but I checked the box.

Again, the reading rooms were quite busy, especially in the late afternoon. That’s new.

(Most of this is for the next book, but the history of linguistics, and some of the Mesopotamian stuff, is for Thinking With Tinderbox, which I promise is almost finished.)

by Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jackson

Get the book.

A strong collection of fascinating research on how cafés actually worked. Sartre and Beauvoir worked at Flore, sitting side by side. This was how books got written. The café was also the place one met with students, argued with colleagues, conspired against rivals.

by Shachar M Pinsker

Get the book.

The Digital Humanities began in Vienna cafés — notably the Arkaden — where a group of student philosophers and mathematicians worked out, for the first time, the power and the limitations of the computer. They had no interest at all in making machines: they were interested in those limitations.

I’m not sure Pinsker knows this story: he is more interested in the literary debates that went on at the other tables. But they’re part of the story, too: those students (mostly guys, but also a couple of young women) met at cafés because that is where you argued about ideas. And they were used to arguing about ideas because they were university students, and because they were Jews.

Everyone knows about those Vienna cafés, but that cafés were Jewish spaces was news to me. That so many of these students were Jews would have been, I think, news to them: they weren't religious, they weren’t observant, and their parents’ Judaism was, for some at least, a quaint family detail, of no importance. The world was about to prove them wrong, but they didn’t know that, not yet.

by Rosalind Brown

Get the book.

Annabel, an Oxford undergraduate, has an essay to write about Shakespeare’s sonnets. This novel is about a long Sunday, narrated in lively detail, during which learns a lot about the sonnets, and about dark ladies and sexy young men, The Scholar and The Seducer. A terrific, and at times a very funny, book.

I’ve been neglecting my book notes, and I think I may be set to indulge in a big pile of research for The Next Book. The result may be a big pile of book notes in the next week or two, as I try to write up the neglected backlog.

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Get the book.

This strange, fascinating, and extraordinary book argues that the conventional story of the dawn of agriculture is wrong. People didn’t leap into agriculture, cities, and states: they appear to have tried it out, decided that they didn’t like it, and found ways to go back to “hobby farming” with a more egalitarian society.

This pattern was both widespread and persistent: the Eastern Woodlands societies that the Europeans encountered, Graeber and Wengrow argue, had been shaped out of revolutionary resistance to the agricultural despotism of Cahokia. Against Cahokia, the American — that is to say, people born in North America — emphasized three core freedoms: the freedom not to take orders, the freedom to move away if things were going sour, and the freedom to invent a new social order if you could convince some other people to adopt it. What’s more, they speculate that a Wendat/Huron diplomat, on a mission to the court of Louis XIV, may have been the origin of The Enlightenment.

I’m trying to finish Thinking In Tinderbox, not least to clear the decks for the next book. But there remain some chapters that just don’t work.

The worst of these concerns the new streaming facilities for Tinderbox actions. These remain (a) very powerful, and (b) unloved. I’ve tried to show they’re (now) easy to use. That wasn’t always true, because there were odd corners of the language into which you could wander and there were dragons. Now, there aren’t. But that’s not enough.

So, I’m turning Chapter 9 into a short essay on languages and notations, with special attention to the Tinderbox action language and the stream notation. Fair enough! But I find I need to know more about the idea of a language, and then the idea of an abstract language.

And so, I made friends with my old graduate school library today. It was sort of amazing: I’ve been away from Widener Library for something like 35 years. The card catalog is gone. The entrance to the stacks it gone. The IT security is insane: it took me an hour or more to set up, and then I had to use my cell phone for internet.

For example: did you know that one of the oldest bits of writing we possess — a bit that was written only a few generations after writing was invented — is a word list translating Sumerian and Elamite? As I understand it, we aren’t quite sure whether what we have is a teacher’s syllabus or some student notes.

But, man: nine hours of intense ancient history, back in the Harvard’s Baths Of Caracalla. Half of everything is exactly the way I left it. The other half is immensely changed, at incredible expense. Those rickety elevators: gone! The light well is now an elegant reading room. The vast reading room is now comfortable, the floors are cork, and the tables are crowded! But now there are auxiliary reading rooms, and those have armchairs. (My complaint about Widener was always that it was a Puritan library that expected you to sit on a cold glass floor in the dimly-lit stacks. Those floors are still not great, and they’re even lower than they used to be when I was 23. Physics and age are what they are. Now, they’ve accepted that it’s nice to be comfortable as you read.)

It’s great to know that, whatever the book you’re reading happens to cite, that reference is bound to be in the stacks. My heart sank when I really wanted to read “Anonymous. Excavations 1985-1986, Iraq 49”. Yikes: nothing at all for the search engine to go on. I assumed this would need a senior reference librarian, perhaps a domain specialist. But I gave it a shot, and it called up the correct reference one the first go.