It’s been a good week for books. I mentioned already De Avonden (Boekenmarkt, Spui) and The Princess Bride (The Book Exchange, Kloveniersburgwal). The same trip netted me Peter Høeg’s A History of Danish Dreams (his Borderliners is a great favourite of mine) and John Crowley’s Little, Big (I’d been hanging out for a copy ever since I read Stefan’s). I grabbed the Project Gutenberg edition of The Three Musketeers and spent a pleasant evening converting it to LaTeX then binding it into a servicable volume. Then today the first fruits of my (other) labours arrived: Ian McDonald’s River of Gods and Florian Cajori’s A History of Mathematical Notations (thanks Erik!).

This last one is precisely the sort of thing I started that unbusiness venture for: a book I would never buy for myself, because there’s always something higher on the priority list, but that once it arrives I realise I’ve been needing forever. It’s two volumes published in 1928 and ’29, in one cover. (And I mean just that: the page numbering goes to 451, then you get a new title page and it starts again. There’s an index in the middle, then another at the end.) We’re talking roughly 900 pages of concentrated 1920’s scholarship, with numbered paragraphs and footnoted references — this baby is going to keep me busy for quite some time. Before I’d finished reading the preface, though, I’d fallen in love with the tone. You have to admire this sort of honest self-reflection:

I desire to record my gratitude to Mrs. Mary Hegeler Carus, president of the Open Court Publishing Company, for undertaking this expensive publication from which no financial profits can be expected to accrue. That’s the voice of a man who wears a hat.