books

I wrote a couple of days ago about having some serious problems with getting started on a term paper for one of my classes. Things with it have moved forward a bit, and so I wanted to toss an update out:

I now have enough material to write the paper. However, only one of my sources is an article; the other two are books. Therein was my problem before. In a previous class with this professor, he specifically stated: articles only. In this class, he focused on getting everyone in the class up to speed with the school’s article databases, but, in hindsight, he didn’t specifically say that we had to use articles only.

I met with him last Friday and had him look over what I had. He came to the same conclusion I had come to: while each individual article would have been fine to use, they didn’t come together very well at all. While they all dealt with intelligence or espionage, they dealt with different spheres of it. His recommendation? Take one of the articles and get two books that the author of the article had cited repeatedly.

I ended up hurting myself by focusing so much on scholarly articles; while they were stressed much more over books (books were more or less not mentioned in class), I could have gone to the professor sooner and asked. Hell, my paper would be written if I’d done that; I had three different books on the influence that the American Revolution exerted on European countries! To be fair, though, he recognized that he’d stressed articles as well, and he’s going to alter the syllabus for later sessions of the class, to clarify that any academic source can be used - articles, books, etc.

As an aside to all of this, it’s funny how so many people have the peculiar idea that “history is done” - that is, there’s nothing to study per se, if you want to know something, you go and look it up in a book. While this is true for a lot of history, most - all, even - of our history can be expanded upon, and in some specific areas, there’s simply nothing written at all. While there are some books on espionage during the Revolutionary War period, there’s a relative dearth of academic articles on the topic.

I mentioned in my last post that “two weeks to find a rare book and to have it delivered from over 4000 miles away isn’t too bad at all!” I still stand by that. However, it’s even better for it to only take 8 days total to go from looking for a rare book to having it arrive at your house; my copy of Russisch ohne Mühe arrived today, and I’m ecstatic. It does indeed seem far superior to the “new and improved” Russisch ohne Mühe Heute, just as I’ve read in language learning forums.

I’m quite ecstatic about the book, as well as the quick delivery. While I touted the wonders of the internet (which I still hold to be true, mind you), I was secretly concerned about something more “worldly”: international shipping hell. I’ve heard my fair share of horror stories about packages that were supposed to hop the pond, and I was really hoping that my book’s voyage didn’t become one of those stories. Obviously, it didn’t.

Lastly, my family thinks I’m a total geek (which I agree with), and perhaps mildly insane (which I can’t totally argue with, at least not all of the time). There’s something über-geeky about excitedly saying, “Excellent! My German-based Russian text has arrived!” Oh well.

I seem to go in cycles; I’ll go for a long period of time not really thinking about the internet and how it’s changed things, and then out of nowhere, I’ll get a slap of reality. My cheek is still stinging a bit from earlier this week.

I recently was hunting a particular book, Russisch ohne Mühe, or Russian without Toil. It’s one of the older courses made by a company called Assimil, and is supposed to be far superior to their modern, “updated” Russisch ohne Mühe heute (Russian without Toil Today). This particular book was first printed in 1971, and as far as I know, Assimil no longer publishes it; they’ve abandoned it entirely in favor of their updated course.

Furthermore, it wasn’t exactly at the top of the bestseller lists when it was new. Let’s face it, the consumer demand for a product which teaches Russian with a German base can’t be that great. However, it actually surprised me just how few copies are floating around. WorldCat, while certainly not exhaustive in regards to libraries, lists a mere three copies worldwide.^[1]

However, despite its relative rarity, as I type this post, the book is on its way to me. It’s coming from a small bookseller in Germany, who sells at a site called booklooker.de. I found her and booklooker.de via bookfinder.com. Finding the book was only the first step though, of course; she of course had to be paid, too! Being in Germany, she obviously wanted to be paid in Euros. I was able to do so by paying her via PayPal; they took care of the conversion stuff for me. Instantly, of course, with no charge added.

All of this sounds rather run of the mill for the internet, which, ultimately, I suppose it is - but when I stopped and thought about what I was able to do and how easy it was, it made me shake my head. Before the internet, how in the world would I have found a now out-of-print book in Germany? If I had been able to find it - which is unlikely to begin with - how long would it have taken? How long would it have taken from the beginning of my search to me actually getting the book? For my recent transaction, assuming the book doesn’t get lost and shows up in the approximate timeframe given, the entire process - from finding the book to it showing up in my mailbox - will amount to a couple of weeks. Two weeks to find a rare book and to have it delivered from over 4000 miles away isn’t too bad at all!

This whole experience has also brought to my mind a big question which I touched on above: before the internet, how did people find rare or out-of-print books? Were there services that would contact a range of used book sellers to find out if the book was available? Did you have to do this yourself? Did you just not get the book, period? In the case of this book, I think even if book-hunt services existed, it would have been difficult to get the book. There were two sellers at booklooker.de who had the book; the one I bought from, while she had 15,000 books listed, specifically stated that to stop by her place and see her books required an appointment, which leads me to believe that she just has a bunch of books in storage, rather than a physical shop. The other guy? He had 3 items listed; he wasn’t really a shopkeeper of any sort, just some guy who threw a few items online to try and sell them. In either case, I think they would have both been overlooked by a book-hunt service.

1. Which are, oddly enough, in the Netherlands, where Dutch is the official language, not German. [↩]

I came across an interesting book a few days ago, The Independent Scholar’s Handbook (PDF). I found it at this site, the Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars. The book is a digital re-issue of this book. I’m not sure what the deal is on the re-issuing of it; the forward on the above-linked site says “It is my pleasure to dedicate this re-issue of THE INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR’S HANDBOOK to Yosef Wosk”, but it never goes to say who said pleasure belongs to. It’s unclear whether the forward is by Ronald Gross (author of the book), or someone else.

Whatever the details behind the re-issuing, the book is available for free. It is basically what the title says: a handbook for those who wish to be scholars, to learn deeply, and to perhaps eventually publish their findings, whatever those may be. I’ve read the first 50 pages or so, and have enjoyed them. The most fundamental thing that the book has pushed beneath my nose is that you don’t have to be in academia to be a scholar. Most scholars are in academia, but the academic position isn’t a prerequisite to being a scholar. This is something that I would have “known”, had I ever thought about it, but I hadn’t. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

There’s a lot of practical how-to stuff in it. Thus far I’ve read about starting an intellectual journal, checking out various realms of knowledge (even if you’ll never be able to “master” all of them, or even a few of them), finding sources (interlibrary loans, databases, etc.). The table of contents shows there’s information on working with others, teaching, getting funding, and beyond, but I can’t say much on these, as I’ve not read them yet. However, if they’re as good, as helpful, and as enjoyable as what I have read, they’ll be quite nice indeed.

I don’t recall how I came across the book / site, but I was interested in it immediately; it sounded like something that would appeal to my inner book geek. If I hadn’t been hooked, I would have been after reading this quote from Max Schuster (of Simon and Schuster), which was said to the author of the book when he was an employee with above-mentioned company:

I have one piece of advice for you - not just for success in this business, but personally. Begin at once - not today, or tomorrow, or at some remote indefinite date, but right now, at this precise moment - to choose some subject, some concept, some great name or idea or event in history on which you can eventually make yourself the world’s supreme expert. Start a crash program immediately to qualify yourself for this self-assignment through reading, research, and reflection.

I’m not sure why, but that quote really spoke to me. It gave me goosebumps on the first read. Anyone else have a similar reaction, or am I just strange?

If you’re going to mooch a book from BookMooch for foreign language learning purposes, it would behoove you to figure out exactly what you’re mooching beforehand. I know; I learned the hard way.

A month or two ago, I was skimming what was available on BookMooch that was 1) in German and 2) available from users in the States. I saw a fiction book, Wie ein einziger Tag by some fellow named Nicholas Sparks. I was wanting a run-of-the-mill fiction book so as to work on my everyday German vocabulary, and this looked like it might fit the bill. I hopped over to the amazon.de page, saw that it had an excellent overall rating, and requested it. I received it in short order, and put it on the shelf until I had some time to sit down and work through some of it.

Tonight I had a bit of time, and so I pulled the book out with pen and notebook in hand. I read through the first 15 or 20 pages, and well - oh my. It’s what I get, really, for being out of the loop in regards to bestseller novelists, especially those who write mostly romance. Sentimental, gushy romance. I skimmed through some of the later sections of the book, and came to the conclusion that, while I’m willing to submit myself to a lot of things in my quest for an enlarged German vocabulary, Nicholas Sparks is not one of the things I’m going to submit myself to. Yuck. I felt like I was reading a very bad soap opera.
If I’d seen this cover of The Notebook (the original English version of Wie ein einziger Tag), I would have known to stay far, far away:

See, sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.

If anyone wants a copy of Wie ein einziger Tag, there’s a copy available on BookMooch.