Distractions, reflections

From the Globe and Mail Focus section¹ this weekend …

… Stephane Dion, the Quebec intellectual who defined the nation perfectly. “Canada,” he said, “is a country that works in practice, but not in theory.”

This citation was from “The trick Lazurus taught the Liberals”, by Peter C. Newman.

¹ Hmmm … the Globe & Mail is launching a reorganized web site, and the Focus seciton doesn’t seem to be showing up!

The last book sale of the year, and traditionally the best. David is slightly disappointed this year.

(by David): I’m usually not looking for specific books, so it’s purely opportunistic whether I come with a huge or small batch of books. This was one of those unlucky years.

The book sales are also usually an opportunity for a social event. A group of friends gets together to stand in line for an hour, and we talk. This year, everyone begged off, so I was by myself. Since I had a client meeting, I arrived relatively late, about 5:30 for a 6:00 p.m. opening. I got number 191, which put me in the basement, but just around the first turn (before all the plumbing is visible!) As forecasted by one of the volunteers there, I was out of the building by 7:15 p.m.

I didn’t find many “hot” books & just a few to fill out my library.

• Wurman, Information Anxiety. Wurman is a master in the visual presentation of data, and this was a nice copy of his book.

David hits the stacks at the university, in the evening when it’s not busy.

(by David):  I have an alumnus library card for U. of Toronto, but access to journal articles requires full-time enrolment. The university library has a few public access terminals up in the stacks, so I can read the full selection of journals if I go to the university in person.

It’s a bit annoying that the university changes protocols every fall, so it takes a bit to find out the new ways. When I was at the university a few weeks ago, I couldn’t find the public access terminals amongst the two dozen that are immediately in front of the elevators on the 11th floor (where the business and economics books are). This time, I decided to try to find the terminals on the 9th floor. They turned out to not be outside the elevators, but hidden away in the stacks, near the books. The PCs have all been replaced, so the screens are a lot sharper than they used to be.

Between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. on a Wednesday night, it was relatively quiet. Students living on campus should be able to access library resources with their IDs, so they wouldn’t physically have to be in the Robarts building.

Another used book sale. The University College book sale is sometimes better and sometimes not as good as the Victoria College book sale. It’s usually got less philosophy, but a better selection of business books.

(by David): The UC book sale opens at noon on the Friday, so when I got there for 5 p.m., there wasn’t any line up

The treasure find of this trip was:

• Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schon, Organizational Learning, A Theory of Action Perspective, Addison Wesley, 1978. It’s a trade paperback for $2. This is one of the most cited books in the management literature, and totally out of print. I think that Argyris doesn’t want it republished because he has newer publications, although they weren’t co-authored with Schon.

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but here’s a list of what I found

• Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior. I hadn’t heard of this book, but Smelser is one of the editors of The Handbook of Economic Sociology. Then the next day, I saw an article referencing this book.
• Mumford, The Culture of Cities. I’ve seen this cited in urban planning books when I read Jane Jacobs, but I can’t remember whether in a positive or negative light!