Hello dear friends,

November is one of my very favorite months for many reasons. I love the crisp fall weather, the colorful leaves outside that crunch under my feet, the chance to begin reflecting on how far this year has brought me, and the promise of upcoming festivities as the holiday season draws near. No matter where you live and what you celebrate, I hope this November you are feeling the excitement, too.

One afternoon we were showing off some of our rare books to visitors, as we are wont to do, when one of them asked if we had Thomas Young’s 1807 A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts. She was a big fan of Thomas Young and wanted to see one of the famous colored prints in person.

Greetings Ex Libris blog readers and Photos of the Month subscribers! Welcome to the first-ever Photos of the Month post to live here on the Ex Libris Universum blog. I encourage PotM subscribers who are new to the blog to look around; my colleagues have written some incredible posts here which I think you’ll like! And blog subscribers: if you are interested in learning more about PotM and what it was before this post, you can explore here.

For my dad, who built his career at Three Mile Island, and whose own reliable, continuous energy powered our family.

When most people hear “Three Mile Island,” I would guess that several thoughts come to mind: nuclear disaster, fear, meltdown, crisis, evacuation, antinuclear protests, just to name a few.

I propose that science be taught at whatever level, from the lowest to the highest, in the humanistic way. It should be taught with a certain historical understanding, with a certain philosophical understanding, with a social understanding and a human understanding in the sense of the biography, the nature of the people who made this construction, the triumphs, the trials, the tribulations. - I.I. Rabi

The Wenner Collection is comprised of brilliant discoveries made by physics pioneers. The contents of the books and journals are invaluable to anyone with an interest in the history of physics. While masterful, the works can be highly technical reads, especially to the layperson. The foreign language works (Latin, French, Italian, German, Swedish, and Russian to name a few) also add a layer of complexity to English readers. As I inventory this Collection, I routinely encounter one element that can be admired without a physics or foreign language background.

The story of physics is often told through the lens of great heroes; it is a narrative shaped by the accomplishments of lone geniuses who exuded an effortless brilliance and unquestionable dedication to the sciences. Physics textbooks highlight the accomplishments of these few scientists throughout the subject’s history to whom we credit with equations, laws, or theories in their names alone (Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s equations, Einstein’s theory of relativity, or the Schrödinger equation, just to give a few examples).

In part five of our ABC blog series, we continue to explore the Wenner Collection using vocabulary defined in John Carter and Nicholas Barker’s classic book, ABC for Book Collectors. Today we are highlighting the letters, O, P, and Q. You can read the entirety of our ABC series here.

O is for Offset

Scientists don’t live and work in a vacuum. They’re products of their time and space just as much as anyone else. Since the Wenner Collection covers 500 years of physics history, in many different countries and languages, we thought it would be fun to take a behind the scenes look at various aspects of history and culture when some of these scientists were writing. Today we’ll be travelling back in time to the mid 1700s, when one of the authors in Wenner's collection, Alexis Claude de Clairaut, was studying and writing.