Sun, 02 Aug 2026
Seven books I keep close because I love them
The bookshelf by my elbow, the one that I can reach without getting up, has seven books on it, not necessarily the ones I look in the most, but the ones whose emanations I most hope will infuse me as I write.
Roget's Thesaurus (4th edition)
The one I actually refer to most often is the Harper and Row Roget's Thesaurus. I thought I had acquired this in my teens, but the note on the flyleaf says 1989.
This is the fourth edition. I was very excited to get the eighth edition, which I thought I might like better, and for some time I kept them next to each other so that I could look up the same things in both, and compare. my conclusion was that while the eighth edition had more stuff in it, it wasn't stuff I needed. And it is really fat. So I have retired it to a farther shelf and will eventually get rid of it.
The thesaurus is a book that is widely misunderstood. It is not, as many people mockingly imagine, just a compendium of synonyms, and its correct and intended use is not to replace common words with more impressive-sounding ones. just as the correct use of a screwdriver is not to scrape the veneer off of an expensive cabinet.
“Thesaurus” means “storehouse" or “treasure room”. Roget's idea, similar to that of John Wilkins before him, was to classify everything in the world into a hierarchy, in this case a hierarchy with a thousand divisions. At the top level the divisions are grouped into "Abstract concepts", "Space”, “Physics”, “Matter”, “Sensation” and so on. Then under “abstract concepts” there are subclasses, of which subclass VI is “Time”, subdivided into five smaller sections:
A. Absolute time
B. Relative time
C. Time with reference to age
D. Time with reference to season
E. Recurrent time
At the next level down, section (1)(VI)(B) is divided into:
§116. Priority
§117. Posteriority
§118. Simultaneity
§119. The Past
§120. The Present
§121. The Future
Roget's idea is that if you are thinking or writing about time, and specifically about how it goes by, you will leaf through those sections for inspiration, not to find a more pompous way of expressing something you have already written, but to refine your own idea of what it is you wanted to express.
Perhaps you are trying to say that one event followed immediately after another. You might look at “§117 posteriority (later time)” which mentions “ensue”, “consequence”, “aftermath”, and “subsequent” — not synonyms, but related aspects of similar concepts, worth more or less consideration depending on what you are trying to emphasize. §117 will also suggest common phrases like “step into the shoes of” — not a synonym by any means, but a related idea. This is probably not what you wanted in this case, but it in another it might be just the thing, and in any case it might give you a bright idea.
If nothing in section 117 seems suitable, it is right next to “§116 priority”, and you might discover that instead of saying that the second event followed immediately after the first, you would rather say that the first immediately preceded the second. Or perhaps you realize, looking at “§118 Simultaneity”, that what you really want to say is that the two event were not quite simultaneous. Or perhaps, finding your way to “§131 Earliness” and “§132 Lateness” you realize that your meaning would be more clearly expressed if you said that the second event was a little tardy, or that the first event was premature.
Looking through the index for “immediately” you will see that the index distinguishes several senses of “immediate”: are you trying to suggest instantaneity, or continuity, or haste, or promptness, or punctuality? And in this way the book helps you refine your understanding of what you were trying to say.
One can use the thesaurus for more concrete tasks. Perhaps I am trying to remember a word, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I know it it is not “coexisting”, but is something like it. I can look up “coexisting” in the index, and it will take me to “§118 Simultaneity” where I find “contemporaneous”… aha, that's what I was looking for! The really important thing about the thesaurus is this large-scale organizing principle, which puts related ideas near one another.
Note that none of this works for someone who doesn't know what the words actually mean. All that person can do with the thesaurus is to replace one wrong word with another one, more or less at random. Effective tool use requires skill and training, and careful thought.
An online version would be more convenient, but again, it wouldn't have the same stuff and I am very attached to the one I have.
My banishment of the 8th edition left a lot of space on the shelf, some of which I have filled with an anthology of the prose of Sir Thomas Browne. I think this will be healthful and inspiring for me, especially if I remember to take it up and thumb through it from time to time.
The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne
One recurring theme on this blog since the very earliest days has been the writers of the English Baroque period. In 2008 I wrote:
[Browne] is witty, and learned, and wise, and humane, and to read his books is to feel that you are in the company of this witty, learned, wise, humane man, one of the best men that the English Renaissance has to offer, and that you are profiting thereby.
His work was also a favorite of Jorge Luis Borges', in case you consider that a recommendation.
Browne has shown up here a number of times, although not so much as he should have, because I started the blog the year after I was on my big Thomas Browne kick. One reason I have put this book next to my elbow is that I hope it will spark a new Browne kick. (I wrote in 2006 “I'm sure I will return someday”, and it is long past time for that return.)
My favorite book by Browne is his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which is a compilation of stuff that people in 1646 believed that Browne thought was probably wrong. I wrote about that in some detail in 2008 although I didn't get around to publishing it until 2020. And somehow the other three articles I was writing about this have never seen the light of day. One is about his discussion of whether John the Baptist actually ate locusts or whether they were locust beans or something else. Browne is firmly on the side of it being actual locusts, as am I. My unpublished article says:
Chester Brown's version of the gospels makes it clear that John was a crazy old bug-gobbler.
Panels from Yummy Fur #17, page 15, by Chester Brown.
Also Sir Thomas comes up in connection with whether snails have eyes in their horns — a rare example where he was wrong, and for a dumb reason:
If we concede they have two eyes, we must alse grant, they have no lesse than four… And therefore if they have two eyes, they have also four, which will be monstrous, and beyond the affirmation of any.
Browne seems to be noping out of the very idea of four-eyed snails, and therefore that they must have none at all. In a later edition of the book, he changed his mind, which is to his credit.
He had a thoughtful and well-informed opinion about whether Pythagoras forbade his followers from eating beans, supposedly because he thought they contained the souls of the dead. (Browne says the former is true, but not the latter.)
I have trouble connecting with the thinkers of the Middle Ages. Their thinking seems to me to be frightened, so overcautious, so cramped and circumscribed, I can't read it without sadness for the way that medieval Christianity strangled the human spirit for so long. But in the early Renaissance there is a flowering of a joyfully brave willingness to try to understand the world, and to follow any inquiry, no matter how extravagant or ridiculous. The whole idea of God has transformed, changed from something constricting to something empowering. The world before belonged to God, and humans were in it only grudgingly and on promise of good behavior. But when the Renaissance started, the world became a beautiful gift, in which humans had been placed to honor God by admiring and marveling at his creation.
This admiration and marvel, the willingness to follow any path to understanding, is how I want to be about knowledge and how I hope I am. Reading Browne, I always feel like he and I would have gotten along well, and that that is one of the best parts of myself.
Boccaccio's Decameron
The story of the Decameron is this: It is 1348, and Florence is devastated by Black Plague. Nothing can be done, despair is everywhere, and there are not enough left living to bury the dead. So ten young people, still healthy, decide to turn their backs on suffering and quit town. They take provisions and servants, retire to the country, and try to forget the horrors they have seen. There they spend the time feasting, walking in the gardens, playing chess, and, once a day, for ten days, they meet, choose a theme, and then each of them tells a story on the theme.
I explained this once to a friend who said “That sounds cool, when was it written?” I said “In 1348!” It is one of the two great works of classical Italian literature, the other of course being Dante. Dante is solidly medieval, hierarchical, doctrinaire, and obsessed with a God who is supposedly loving but doesn't seem to know how to show it. That was in 1308 or so, and then, only a few decades later, we have the Decameron which could not be more different. It is about people, doing people things in the real world, eating, drinking, singing, arguing, and making love. God is present, but not oppressive. He has sent a terrible plague for who knows what reason, but rather than submit to it the characters of the Decameron try to take practical steps to make the best of it.
There is a story in the Decameron for every mood, usually more than one. Some are sad, some romantic, some funny and salacious. Dioneo is exempt from following the daily theme and usually has a story that is more or less dirty.
My favorite story is probably the one about the cross-dressing English princess, or perhaps the one about how young Caterina wanted to sleep on the balcony so that she could hear the nightingale, which I find very sweet. But the funniest one is about the abbess who is called out of her cell one night to berate a nun for having her lover stay over, and who doesn't realize that in her hurry she has put her own lover's trousers on her head instead of her wimple.
I have several different Decamerons, but this copy is the Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin translation, which has made several previous appearances here:
There's also an unpublished blog article inviting me to look into this passage:
Messer Lotto Gualandi gave him a daughter of his, Bartolomea by name, one of the fairest and handsomest young ladies of Pisa — although most of the females from that benighted town look like tarantulas.
The J.M. Rigg translation says “spotted lizards”. This is closer to the original Italian, which is lucertole verminare, literally small wormy lizards.
I have my doubts about the desirability of living to be a thousand years old, but if I do decide to do it, one reason will certainly be that I will need the time to learn Medieval Italian and translate the Decameron.
From Frege to Gödel, edited by van Heijenoort
This is a collection of the most important papers in mathematical logic from the time of Frege (who, I have written before, was responsible for kicking the field of logic out of its medieval period into the modern world) to Gödel (who spoiled everything).
In between these van Heijenoort hits all the most important ideas, starting with Frege's explanation of Begriffsschrift, which is wacky and weird and which didn't catch on except it kind of did and it still underlies half of mathematical logic and which is the prototype for many of the symbols we still use. After this there is Russell's tragic correspondence with Frege in which he pointed out, too late, that Frege's foundational theory didn't work.
The book reprints Peano's original description of the Peano numbers, perhaps the most successful single mathematical theory of all time.
The book includes Zermelo's proof of Zermelo's theorem that every set can be well-ordered, and Ackermann's discovery of Ackermann's function, which demonstrated the not every computable function is primitive recursive.
The book has Russell on type theory and early work by Kolmogorov and Brouwer on the origin of intuitionism. (Heyting is missing.)
Van Heijenoort has come up here when I wanted to quote from Schönfinkel's paper about the SKI-calculus, Wiener's paper inventing the ordered pair, and implicitly in probably a dozen other math and logic articles here over the years.
The book is on my shelf because I refer to it pretty often, but also because I can usually find something interesting just by thumbing through it. For example, these remarks by Thoralf Skolem about the futility of deriving induction from set-theoretic foundations.
Bonus trivia: Van Heijenoort was the personal secretary of Leon Trotsky, and while he was accompanying Trotsky during the latter's exile in Mexico, he was one of Frida Kahlo's lovers.
Orbis Sensualium Pictis (English edition), Johannes Comenius
I adore this book. My heart swells with love when I think of it.
I don't have a blog article about it and there is a story behind that. In 2018 I went to a conference in Cleveland and my hotel was in a building that had formerly been the Cleveland Department of Education. It contains two big murals, one depicting “The Progress of Education”:
I planned to write a blog article about these people. It's clear who some of them are. For example, Moses is easy to recognize at lower right, because of the glowing horns, and Confucius is next to him. Some people I was familiar with once they were identified for me: the red-haired guy second from right in the back row is Friedrich Fröbel, who I knew; his “gifts” are a forerunner of the Montessori materials.
But in doing the research I got to the bearded hat-wearing dude topmost on the right side and completely fell off the bus, because that is Johann Comenius who is famous because he wrote one of the most marvelous and enchanting books I've ever read, the Orbis Pictus.
I have to resist the temptation to say too much, because Orbis Pictus derailed the article about “The Progress of Education”, it then derailed its own article which has been in progress for eight years, and if I let it it will derail this article too, because every time I pick up Orbis Pictus I forget whatever I was doing and I am lost in the pages with a happy and innocent smile on my face.
I'm going to precommit to writing only one paragraph about this incredible book. It was the first illustrated children's book published in Europe, in 1658, and it was an immediate hit, being translated from German into English the following year, then into French, Italian, and many other languages. It swept the continent because everyone loved it.
Most of the book follows this pattern: there will be an engraved illustration, depicting some aspect of ordinary human activity, such as (I open it up to a random page) “Tame Foul” (that is, “fowl”):
Items of interest in the engraving are annotated with numbers, and the facing page explains the illustration, one item at a time:
The Cock 1 (which croweth in a morning), hath a comb, 2.
In a second column to the right of this is the same text, but in Latin, so that while the reader is learning about tame fowl, they are also learning Latin:
Gallus 1. (qui manè cantat) habet Cristam, 2.
The prose is limpid, gentle, pithy, and direct. It hits the important points of interest, invites questions, and ends before anyone can get bored. There are pages on anatomy, butchery, feasting, winemaking, various principal virtues, family trees, cities, burials, ships, wells, horology, amphibians.
Now I will reluctantly put it down, rather than leaving this article unfinished as I have so many before.
The Bible (New International Version, large print)
This of course is the cornerstone of Western culture and no well-educated person can be without a knowledge of what is in it. It is full of great wisdom and great stories, and also cruelty, evil lies, and reminders that the world now is in many ways better than it was because people are better.
I would like to understand the world I live in, and there is no way to understand 21st-century America without understanding the Bible.
The NIV is not the most poetical translation, but it is clear, modern, and accurate. (I got it on the recommendation of Sterling Hanenkampf. Thanks, Sterling!) In former times I had a collection of Bibles but this is the only one that remains. I even got rid of the old King James that belonged to my mother, since office space is precious and I have had a digital copy on my computer since the early 1990s.
I find that most of my articles mentioning the Bible are unpublished for some reason. It comes up a bit in connection with Ploni Almoni, and in passing in many other places.
One of the unfinished articles is a series of notes on the theme of Jesus's admonition “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7) and its relationship to a lot of other things like lightning rods, Christian Science (not Christian science), how Larry Wall became a computer programmer, Pikuach nefesh, and the story of the old lady who refused to evacuate from her house during a flood. It'll be epic if I ever finish it, but I probably won't.
Another incomplete one is about the incredible story of Samson and Delilah:
She asks him flat out:
[Judges 16:6] Tell me the secret of your great strength, and how you can be tied up and subdued.
Instead of just telling her to fuck off, Samson lies:
[16:7] If anyone ties me with seven fresh bowstrings that have not been dried, I'll become as weak as any other man.
The Philistines bring her bowstrings and she tries it that night, but Samson snaps the bowstrings as easily as a piece of string snaps when it comes close to a flame. …
Then it goes as before! He tells her a different lie, knowing full well that she will betray him, and she does betray him, and he makes a fool of her again! (16:11–12)
Okay, that was fun. Let's do it again! (16:13–14)
After several repetitions of this, Samson decides that being shaved, blinded and crushed will be less exasperating than listening to any more of Delilah's nagging.
I read once that the whole point of the book of Judges is that the people in it are all terrible, they are all far from the path of righteousness, and so you definitely shouldn't act like them. I don't know if that interpretation is correct, but it is certainly true that the people in it are all terrible.
The Belles Heures of Duc de Berry
This book turned up in one of my very first blog articles, on abbreviations in medieval manuscripts, although I didn't know it at the time. In my teens, on a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I picked up a print of this:
Then I carried it with me for the next forty years, eventually framing it and hanging it up, and it is hanging in my house now.
Many years after, when I was still on Twitter and Twitter was still fun, I subscribed to a daily feed from the Met, and one day they tweeted this page, or perhaps another page from the same book, stylistically similar enough that I recognized it immediately. They said where it was from: it's the Belles Heures, a “book of hours”, which tells the reader when to pray and how, and which days are sacred to which saints. Very wealthy people had super-fancy ones made from the very best materials, with illustrations by the very best craftsmen.
The Duc de Berry was so wealthy that he had more than one, as I found out when I accidentally ordered and received the Tres Riches Heures. But I got the one I wanted eventually.
The Duc de Berry book is by Millard Meiss and Elizabeth H. Beatson, and alternates beween the magnificent color plates and prose discussing each one. From the inscription on the page above I had been able to figure out that this was John the Baptist (see previous article), and the authors aren't sure who the other two people are, but they did at least tell me that John was the Duc de Berry's name-saint. (Funny how John keeps popping up, isn't it?)
More recently I had another very similar Internet revelation. I've had this framed postcard hanging up for many years:
and thanks to a recent Mastodon toot by Cam Larios, I found out that it is from the “Black Hours” of the Morgan Library.
#8?
The banishment of the very large Roget 8th edition has left enough space on the shelf for an eighth book. I took a quick look around my office to see if there was anything else that wanted to fill that space, but nothing volunteered.
(Actually I think Tristan Needham's Visual Complex Analysis might be waving to me from across the room.)
Other stuff
There are other things in the photo that should not be on this shelf and I don't know why they are:
- A packet of googly eye stickers
- Glass and ceramic coasters that I don't use because my coffee cup is always on my electric mug warmer
- A small audio speaker that might or might not work
- A boxful of 8mm-helical scan backup tape from the 1990s
- A pair of old laptop 2.5-inch hard disks that I hope to someday get the data out of
- A set of Korean playing cards
The shelf is like my brain, I guess, full of stuff, and and what's in it doesn't always make sense or go together with the other stuff.
This article was prepared by GNU Emacs, Rael Dornfest's “Blosxom” software, GNU grep, and the Kubuntu desktop environment, with minor assistance from me. Spelling correction was provided by ispell. The four em-dashes were organically cultivated and sustainably harvested.
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