the nerdly pleasures

There are a lot of not-so-great things about being a junior academic. But there's still one thing I love: I get to spend time in beautiful libraries and read nerdy books! It's not so easy anymore; from 2001-2013, I was no more than a twenty-minute walk from a world class library. Not only did those libraries have incredible resources, they also had the will and motivation to make those resources as accessible as possible. I could order books delivered by hand to my mailbox; I could ask for articles in the stacks to be PDFed and emailed to me, so that I didn't need to search for them myself. Ah, the halcyon days of yore!

Learning to use the academic resources in New York has not been easy. Like so many other things in NYC, everything you want is available, in theory, but in practice, those things are difficult to access, prohibitively expensive, oversubscribed, or inconveniently far away. And so it is with the books. To get reader's privileges at the library at Columbia, I had to apply to a University Seminar and be accepted; but I'm not allowed to check out anything or use the online resources from off-site, so I have to be physically in the building (an hour and twenty minutes from home) in order to access the information. The New York Public Library is easier to get into, but most of the scholarly books are kept in New Jersey, so you have to order them a few days ahead of time, and even the books on site take over an hour to be delivered to you from the closed stacks by the library gnomes. You can't take those books home with you either.

I complain a lot about the schlep and the waiting, but once I get through them, it's so good. Here's Columbia, with its special non-circulating reading room devoted to Ancient/Medieval Studies:

 

 The view, when I need to rest my eyes

The NYPL, after sunset

 

And here's a book that I couldn't access anywhere - except at the NYPL. It's a 1912 dissertation written in Latin by a German scholar, and, as you can see, it's just crumbling into bits. No library in all of ILL was willing to ship it out (all copies are probably in similarly poor condition), so it's a good thing I could find a local copy!