I’ll admit to having a bit of a book fetish. I love everything about books except moving them. I collect new and old books. I have a professional chemistry library that is consuming quite a bit of wall space. And that doesn’t include the boxes of JOC, Organometallics, and JACS. It’s getting out of control.
My amateur geology library has gone from one book last summer to about 50 books and USGS circulars today, and more are enroute this very minute thanks to Amazon.com, Paleopublications, and many more booksellers.
What I’m beginning to see is that university libraries across the country are withdrawing older chemistry books from their shelves. I do not refer to textbooks. I am referring to the valuable secondary literature that has accumulated descriptive chemistry knowledge. These books are snatched up by specialty book sellers and are placed on the internets for sale where odd characters such as myself will gratefully buy them.
Recently my fetish for old books is helping me solve a thorny contemporary inorganic analysis/synthesis problem. You see, the older texts are rich in wet chemical methods. While a book like Chemistry of the Elements by Greenwood and Earnshaw is fantastically broad in its scope, it is not meant to transfer the pargmatics of procedure. The older chemistry and ore refining texts are full of practical information that seems to be fading away. While the primary literature may be available on SciFinder, books that cover accumulated descriptive chemistries are becoming scarce.
I can’t reveal the details of my revelation. But I can say that a process development person can learn quite a bit about materials processing from the late 19th and early 20th century literature. Our predecessors couldn’t depend on ICP or GDMS or XRD to help them follow the process. The wet chemical methods they developed also give us insights into the transformations necessary to produce purified products.
The unit operations of calcining, comminution, reduction, oxidation, flotation, dissolution, drying, etc., have not changed much in a fundamental way since the days of Agricola. But they are better quantified by virtue of a century of research.
Our collective drift from wet chemical methods to instrumental and computational approaches to analysis are also taking many of us away from the pragmatics of chemistry. The hyphenated instruments of today are leading large numbers of chemists away from the art of chemical transformation and isolation in favor of chemist-as-software-expert. Certainly this computational intensive investigation is not lost in our university curricula. Our hypnotic embrace of technological triumphalism meshes with the perceived need to minimize hazardous material inventories in the chemistry department stockroom. And with the perceived need to minimize chemistry students to exposure to chemicals.
Chemical industry is centered on the art of making things. In the end, somebody has to figure out how to make chemical substances and somebody else has to do the actual work. We chemists have to make sure that university curricula meets the needs of society and that the librarians of the world understand the importance of older chemistry books.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
“If you want a new idea, read an old book.” (I don’t know the source.)
Even older journal articles, while still primary literature, are valuable since few publishers are putting their entire collections online.
My biggest issue with acquring more books is that I never know them like it know my old textbooks, the ones that I spent weeks poring over, memorizing every detail.
Hmm… “chemist-as-software-expert” got me thinking. I got one of these for the holidays:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/index.asp
(Love it)
I can imagine a time in the future where the Gaussling will be browsing around old archive servers looking for a version of an old ereader OS that will properly load and display his dusty copy of “Hexa-Penta-Slimenol-Trimolecule Chemisty for Fun and Profit”.
Dude- I’ll be out your way in March. I want to take a couple vacation days and visit a cinnabar mine site, if any can be seen. There was a big one in New Almaden, which is in the neighborhood of San Jose.
Sweet… Look forward to seeing you.
I was hoping you would be in San Francisco in February so I could meet you…
It says- “store as many as 1500 ebooks …” What that really means is, lose as many as 1500 ebooks all at once.
Chemistry violently abandoned the bench: 1) budget, 2) Enviro-whinerism, 3) objectively unqualified people are objectively empirically unqualified at the bench.
http://www.chemistry.illinois.edu/about/history/marvel.html
“I could smell a low aliphatic alcohol, a volatile fatty acid and an aromatic amine.”
Contemporary US chem graduates are chrome-plated ornaments. 13,921 BS/Chem gushed out in 2008 plus 2362 newly conferred chemistry PhDs. San Berdoo doesn’t need nearly that many meth cookers. US industry doesn’t want the loathsome local product except in analytical. Unending repetitive work is best staffed by people barely smart enough to do the work. Who really cares about contained numbers if the paperwork is on time and in order?
To topple a skyscraper civilization, undermine a corner of its foundations.
Hmm, I’m with you on this gauss. (i think, though its painful to admit how often I misread stuff these days) I also love purchasing the old books on the cheap. Its best to get them when companies like BP or Carbide are shutting down corporate libraries…
But, while I fear this a bit – Isn’t google in cahoots with UM and others to scan in the whole library? I just signed a letter from the alma mater giving my ok to the digitizing of my dissertation.
But – think of this situation. As an orgo prof I have text books tossed at me with every new edition. I refuse to sell these – you should see what they are doing to my wall.
On another note – one man’s analytical method is anothers synthetic method. Silicon can be removed from aromatic rings with HBr/AlBr3, leaving behind an H. Sometimes the Silicon chemists view the Si-Ph as just a protected Si-Br bond.
“In the end, somebody has to figure out how to make chemical substances and somebody else has to do the actual work.”
My graduate advisor liked to say “if chemists don’t use chemicals, who will?”