More about books - and bookshelves

In our wanderings, mine alone in 1950-57, Wendy's and mine in 1957-2010, books had to be accommodated. Book shelves have always been among our most important articles of furniture, as important as our bed and dining table. When I traveled, even just overnight to London from Edinburgh, to Toronto or Washington from Ottawa, I always packed 2 or 3 books as well as a change of underwear and socks. And of course I almost always came home with more books than I had when I set out. 

Whenever we came to rest, for example in the sabbatical year in New York, the brief sabbatical in Sydney and Canberra, books accumulated like coat hangers in a closet or paperclips in a desk drawer, or flotsam at the high tide line on a beach. At the end of our year in New York, books occupied a very large part of the rental truck I hired to carry our loot back to Ottawa.  

Book shelves proliferated when we settled for a few years, planks on bricks or milk cartons at first, then shelving I installed myself, Ikea shelves and best of all, adjustable metal shelves I bought from the University of Ottawa supplier when we came to rest in Ottawa.

There were never enough shelves, never enough space on bedside tables or other surfaces. When I traveled for 2 month spells as a WHO consultant in Indonesia or India, books made up almost half my luggage by weight. On sea voyages across the world I took along 30-40 books. I'd have loved a Kobo or other electronic reader in those days! Now I can't abide electronic readers, save for my iPad on which the text scrolls rather than moving on one page at a time. The Kobo irritates me because it is so slow changing to the next page - I'm a fast reader and absorb a page of text in less time that I spend waiting for the next page to load and display on the Kobo, so I rarely bother with it, never since I got an iPad. 

Storage space for books reached its apogee in our row house on Waverley Street where 12-14 foot ceilings allowed taller book shelves than we had in any other home, and I had a little ladder to reach the top shelves. I never measured the amount of shelf space in the Waverley Street row house. It must have been at least 18 meters more than I had in the cottage on Echo Drive because when we moved to Echo Drive, the tall set of homemade shelves that my colleague Ian McDowell helped me to make didn't come with us.  They were too tall to accommodate anywhere in that low ceilinged home, where I did measure: I had 74 meters of shelf space in the Echo Drive cottage, had to reduce to 21 meters when we moved into the apartment where I live now. Fortunately our children and grandchildren love books too, so many I had to discard found a welcome elsewhere in the family. But I had to sell or give away many others, and I miss them dreadfully. I had another 24 meters of shelves installed under the picture windows in my apartment, and of course filled them instantly. Next perhaps I'll put some shelves in the bedroom... 

What have I got on these shelves? The glass-fronted antique break-front has a few very old books from the early 19th century, including Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, some valuable facsimile editions of works on Australian exploration, miscellaneous works on ancient, medieval and modern history, travel and exploration and some modern first editions. There are more of these in the revolving shelves Rebecca had built for me, and in the shelves in the dining room and under the picture windows. Mainly though, I just have a miscellaneous collection of paperbacks, non-fiction, history, fiction, you name it.

Breakfront glass shelves

Office south wall

Office east and south walls

Revolving shelves and room divider 

Room divider (west side)

Right bedside table

                                                                                                               

 Left Bedside table

Room divider east side

Dining room

Lobby

Shelves below western picture windows

Here are some photos of the shelves in my apartment. Even the bedside tables have become additional improvised book shelves.

Bibliophilia, with occasional bibliomania

It's odd that I haven't posted a confession before now about my addiction to books. My addiction is almost life-long. It began in a serious way before puberty. I've commented often about books I've been reading, and perhaps I've implied that all the books I've mentioned have been my own, but I don't think I've ever said this in so many words. It's a better kind of addiction than gambling or getting hooked on alcohol or drugs; and although it can be costly, at least there is something to show for it.

From time to time I have an opportunity to speak about books, and I'll be doing so again in the Roddick Room of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada on May 22, when I will talk about the John Last Collection to members of the Medical History Club of Ottawa.

I donated my collection of antiquarian 'medical' books and others of interest to physicians, to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada after the second break-in at our vulnerable home, because I feared further break-ins and vandalizing of rare and valuable books.

The John Last Collection, valued at about $80,000 in 1992, must be worth over $100,000 by now, if it remains intact and undamaged. I know it has been damaged by an ignoramus who had several partly disbound books rebound rather than repaired, and discarded the original boards on which owners had written their signatures, revealing the history of books as they passed through the hands of successive owners, sometimes famous or distinguished people. I fear there may have been some pilfering too, and will find out next week when I visit the collection after an interval of nearly 20 years since I last saw it.

The curator of special collections at the RCPSC partly classified the collection:

Antiquarian, facsimile and rare books           289
Books on history of medicine                       278
Public health, vital statistics etc                    188
Ethics, philosophy of medicine                       79
Biography, autobiography                              73
Reference                                                      25

Some can be further classified.  For instance, about a dozen  are classical works of natural history, including early editions of several works of Charles Darwin. There is a first American edition of the Origin of Species and a sixth English edition, in which Darwin expanded on and clarified a few phrases that had confused readers of earlier editions. Darwin's Journal of Researches ... during the voyage ... of HMS Beagle (1890 edition) remains on my own shelves with a note that it belongs to the collection; so does Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and a first edition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. I will deliver all four books to the Royal College in due course.

I began collecting antiquarian books absent-mindedly and by accident. In 1961-62 I was a visiting fellow in the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit, doing field work in three industrial cities in the north of England, Stoke on Trent, Wigan and Middlesborough, usually commuting by train for the day on the fast and in those days excellent trains of British Railways.  One day I arrived in Stoke on Trent in the midst of a torrential rain storm with over an hour before my first interview. Across the road from the railway station was a second-hand book shop I'd noticed on previous visits to Stoke. It was an ideal place to while away the time, stay dry, perhaps pick up a bargain. I did better. On a shelf of dusty old - almost ancient - books, I picked up a copy of Robinson Crusoe, and a copy of Gulliver's Travels, both published early in the 19th century, for sixpence each. On the same shelf there was a copy of The Whole Works of that Excellent Practical Physician Thomas Sydenham, Corrected from the Original Latin. It was in terrible condition, with no back cover, binding loose, some pages missing; it cost 10 shillings, my lunch money. I bought it - and a few years later, changed it for a copy in much better condition from McNaughton's Bookshop in Edinburgh.  By then, living in that lovely city, made lovelier by several excellent antiquarian book shops, I had a tiny amount of disposable income to spare for books, so my collection expanded rapidly, even augmented occasionally by carefully selected old books of historical interest in my domain of specialization.  I kept them all when we migrated from Edinburgh to Ottawa, and all but one arrived intact. A Nonesuch Press edition of the Complete Works of Lewis Carrol with the Teniel illustrations had a nail driven through from front cover to back when a careless packer misfired. Insurance replaced it, although not with the early Nonesuch Press edition, unfortunately.

To finish off this post, here are a few photos that happen to have some of my books in the background.

495 Island Park Drive, c. 1976

495 Island Park Drive, c. 1976

34 Waverley Street, c. 1983

685 Echo Drive, 1995

11A/300 Queen Elizabeth Drive, 2012

                     

First Janet Wendy Last and John Last visiting professor

This has been a banner week. When Wendy died I gave some money to the University of Ottawa in her memory, suggesting that it might be used to establish a visiting professor appointment. With an eye to the future, I added to my will a bequest to the medical school that would make it possible to keep the visiting professor appointment for about 10 cycles if the funds are wisely used, by which time I hope others would contribute to the fund so it could be maintained for a longer period. 

University rules rightly prohibit me from playing any part in selecting the incumbent - although that didn't inhibit me from offering suggestions to the committee responsible. I think they made an inspired choice.  Johan Mackenbach is professor and head of the department of public health at Erasmus University medical school in Rotterdam. He is a towering figure in epidemiology and public health, well known for his contributions to social epidemiology, health services research, and studies at the interface of demography  and epidemiology. He has published over 300 original peer-reviewed articles, and books, book chapters, and official reports to governments and intergovernmental agencies. One of the perks of old age is that I've given up the almost obsessional scouring of medical journals that was an important part of my professional life for more than 60 years. But I make an exception to this practice: When I see Johan Mackenbach's name on a paper, I read it, knowing it will be wise, penetrating, innovative, probably witty.

These qualities were abundantly present in his lectures and discussions with all of us during the few days of his visit. He gave formal lectures on socioeconomic inequalities in health, and on successes and failures of health policy, drawing on data from all the 27 disparate nations of the European Union, showing how these data can be used to derive important conclusions about determinants of success and failure.    

I hope his visit will lead to a bond between Erasmus University department of public health and our department in Ottawa, with 2-way exchanges that will strengthen all of us and thereby contribute to better health on both sides of the Atlantic.

I had the pleasure and privilege of presenting a dramatic Ojibwe print to Johan Mackenbach at the reception after his lecture on 10 April

On the left, Johan Mackenbach with me and Rebecca, David and Jonathan, and on the right, with Brenda Wilson, professor, and Julian Little, professor and head of our department

More on the future - thinking and planning

We can't know the future, our own or anybody else's, but we can think about it in a systematic way and put our plans on a firmer base than if we just go blindly on, letting things happen. The simplest method is to extrapolate past and present observed data onward into the future, assuming trends will adhere to past and present observations. It helps when we have reliable data sets that remain stable over a long period. 

But these don't always work. In the 1950s, soon after I graduated from medical school it was widely believed that the total conquest of all infectious diseases was imminent: soon we would have powerful antibiotics, antiviral agents, and vaccines that would control all forms of contagious or communicable diseases, and there would be no future career for infectious disease specialists. Belief in that notion deterred me from specializing in infectious diseases, a field to which I was quite strongly attracted. Perhaps I chose wrongly: in the last 30 years of the 20th century, at least 30 entirely new and for the most part deadly infectious diseases hit humanity. HIV/AIDS afflicted over 40 million people, killed about 12 million by the end of the 20th century.

Another way to think about and plan for the future is to imagine alternative futures, scenarios of probable and possible ways that events could come together and coalesce in game-changing ways. Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world's largest oil companies, based its planning for future petroleum demands on scenarios. One scenario imagined the impact on supply/demand interaction of a political upheaval that suddenly removed a major oil supplier from world markets.  Because they had plans ready for this, they were resilient and able to adapt rapidly to the Iranian revolution while all the other large oil companies were caught flat-footed, unable to adapt overnight to this major disruption of oil supply. The Dutch applied the scenario approach in the health field and detailed scenarios were prepared, dealing with the future of heart disease, cancer, old age, traffic crashes, mental disorders, innovative technologies, and much else. I paid several visits to the Netherlands (and to Sweden, which adopted a similar approach) in the early 1980s, and passed on what I learnt to health planners in the government of Canada. I must have selected the wrong senior bureaucrats, because so far as I could tell, nobody in Health Canada reacted to my suggestions.

A third method of future planning is 'visioning', in which the planning group imagines a set of alternative futures, decides which of these is the most desirable and which is the least desirable; planners then set out to make the most desirable future happen, and take action to ensure that the least desirable future doesn't happen.  Without actually applying this technique, there have been a few times in my life (and Wendy's) when we used visioning to help us plan our future. The most important of these, and the most spectacularly successful, was our decision to come to the University of Ottawa medical school, rather than to accept the superficially exciting cross appointment at Harvard medical school and the Harvard school of public health. I'm sure I'd have sunk without trace in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, whereas I've had a wonderful time and a successful career in Ottawa.   

The Future

One of my life's ironies, as I've said and written before, is that as my personal future shrinks, I become more concerned about the long-term future. What will the world be like when my grandchildren are my age? What kind of lives will their grandchildren enjoy? Will my grandchildren's grandchildren live in a world in which they can utter the verb 'enjoy' with pleasurable memories? This year I have read 3 provocative accounts of the human condition, as well as the prognostications of eminent people who speak for the United Nations, the World Bank, other prominent top executives including President Obama. Not, of course, the prime minister of Canada or any member of his government, which goes on its lemming-like way, ignoring all the warning signals, dismantling agencies and measuring systems so no one, they hope, can even observe what is happening in climate-sensitive or environmentally threatened regions, anywhere in Canada.

The first warning in 2013 came from Paul and Anne Ehrlich in Proceedings of the Royal Society, in a comprehensive summary of the evidence that Homo sapiens, along with most other living creatures is an endangered species. This month, Daedalus, the quarterly journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, carried an essay by two historians on "future history", purportedly looking back from 100 years hence at the mistakes and misdeeds of our time that led to the destruction of western civilization. Al Gore, Vice President of the United States in the Clinton administration, has written at greater length in a weighty monograph, simply called The Future. Al Gore considers 'trends' that are shaping our present and future:

1. Globalized economy, or Earth, Inc. The proponents of globalization think only of what profits they will get, seldom consider investing in sustainable systems
2. Computers and the internet - a 'global mind'
3. Power in the balance.Al Gore implies what I perceive, a power vacuum, absence of visionary leadership when humankind has never needed visionary leadership as much as we do now and in the near future
4. "Outgrowth" socially, demographically, and political chaos
5. "Reinvention" of life and death - consequences of biomedical advances
6. Multiple interactions of these five trends threaten humans and other living creatures in the global ecosystem in many complex ways. Mass extinctions are occurring; sustainable agriculture is seriously threatened by extreme weather; pollution is causing widespread, often poorly understood harms; we have embraced dangerous new technologies such as fracking with no regard for their possible or probable adverse consequences. The gravest dangers come from the disrupted climate and from the increasingly damaged marine ecosystem. And, I must add, from the human swarming that began just over 100 years ago and led to unsustainable quadrupling of the population from 1.7 billion in 1900 to 6.4 billion by 1999, 7 billion a year ago and a projected 9 billion by 2050.   

Al Gore tries to remain optimistic but it is difficult to present a convincing case for a constructive and positive outcome of the present environmental and ecological situation. The world is too firmly in the grasp of the greedy and visionless, concerned only about short-term profits.  Collectively these substantial essays and a weighty monograph send a powerful message that can be ignored only by the most ideologically blinkered and wilfully wrong-headed among the educated classes. Yet I know several who fit this description, nice people who persist in believing the lies and distortions of the energy industry's tame pseudo-scientists and propagandists, refuse to accept the readily available scientific evidence and increasingly obvious signs all around them of rapidly changing climate, erratic seasons, extreme weather events, species extinctions and all the rest. 

I'm 86, well past my "Use by..." date, have lived a long, productive, useful and happy life.  I hope my grandchildren and those generations after them, will have opportunities for as much to enjoy as I have had.  But I fear that the odds against are rising.

References

1. Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich: Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? Proc R Soc B 280:2013 - .pdf
See http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845.full.pdf+html

2. Naomi Oreskes, Erik M Conway: The collapse of Western Civilization: a view from the future. Daedalus, 2013: 142:40-58

3. Al Gore: The Future; Six drivers of global change. New York: Random House, 2013; available in pdf and as an e-book