Today, marking our present year and the year of the MIT
Sesquicentennial, we want to thank everyone who had a hand in
making this online exhibit possible. And, of course, we want to thank you, our loyal readers.

150 Years in the Stacks Team:
Michelle Baildon
Patrick Ford
Patrick Olson
Audrey Pearson
Stephen Skuce

Additional contributions by:
Patsy Baudoin
Alex Caracuzzo
Chris Donnelly
Kate Gyllensvard
Nora Murphy
Michael Noga
Tom Rosko
Ray Schmidt
Andrea Schuler
Mark Szarko

Photography: Patrick Olson and Bexx Caswell
Blog administration: Audrey Pearson
Setup and technical support: Remlee Green
Additional technical support: Darcy Duke
Concept and coordination: Stephen Skuce

Victorians filled auditoriums to hear presentations by the leading scientific lights of their day. Michael Faraday’s lectures on electricity and magnetism, for example, were wildly popular and people jammed every hall in which he appeared.

But for all their interest in the sciences, Victorians could have trouble distinguishing between legitimate lines of scientific inquiry and what author Sherrie Lynne Lyons calls “marginal science.” The latter isn’t limited only to deliberate charlatanism and quackery, though.

Theories that we now perceive as pseudoscience, or even just plain nonsense, might at one time have been perceived as entirely rational scientific questions, well worth investigating. Sometimes very serious people with very serious intentions pursue paths that seem silly in hindsight but which, in the immortal phrase, “seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Charles Lyell – distinguished geologist, member of the Royal Society, sane person, and good friend of Charles Darwin – admitted that he “believed in the sea serpent without ever having seen it.” William Crookes, a productive, respected, and accomplished 19th century chemist and physicist, developed a serious interest in spiritualism. They were not alone, Lyons tells us, and their pursuits did not make them quacks.

Consider: the MIT Libraries’ Vail Collection was assembled during the Victorian era. It’s one of the world’s most important collections of books on electricity, electrical engineering, magnetism, and allied sciences … and it also contains material on “animal magnetism.” Because no one could account for the vital force that animated living beings, theories proliferated. Among them was the idea that a magnetic “fluid” of some sort lay within, and could be transferred between, sentient creatures. Serious investigations into “animal magnetism,” of course, could easily diverge into questions about spiritualism, mesmerism, psychic phenomena, and so on.

Thus the Vail Collection contains 17th century books on witchcraft; the complete multi-year run of a serious 19th century journal produced by the Society for Psychical Research; and even books on palm reading.

Today we congratulate ourselves for dismissing such seemingly ridiculous concepts as phrenology and palmistry, and for denying the existence of sea serpents. But one of the most difficult aspects of the scientific enterprise is the question asked at the outset: which phenomena actually merit serious scientific investigation? It’s only with the luxury of hindsight that such questions seem easy to answer.

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Early in 2007, Charles Morris emailed his publisher. “I think we’re heading for the mother of all crashes,” he wrote.  “It will happen in summer of 2008, I think.” At the same time, our nation’s financial leaders, both in Washington and on Wall Street, were telling Congress that the U.S. economy was in beautiful shape. Unfortunately, it was Morris who turned out to be right.

In his foreword, the author treats us to a simplified account of the credit bubble. “Not long ago,” he writes, “the sum of all financial assets – stocks, bonds, loans, mortgages, and the like, which are claims on real things – were about equal to global GDP. Now they are approaching four times global GDP.” He likens this situation to an inverted pyramid, which becomes more wobbly as you pile on more claims. “And when large, wobbly objects tumble, they go very fast.”

In this volume deemed a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and a Best Book of 2008 by The Economist, Morris explains for the layman, in crystal clear prose, what got us into this Great Recession. Or maybe we should say what Morris predicted would cause this Great Recession, since he wrote much of the book before the market crashed.

Morris himself is a former lawyer and banker. In fact, he ran a company that built the software that enabled bankers to create the sophisticated credit instruments that landed us in this mess. He was dismayed by what bankers were doing with his software. “This is crazy,” he said in a 2008 interview with NPR. “I was sure that people weren’t keeping track of the trends so they had proper margins and collateral and so forth.” The credit instruments were too complex and the volume of trading too high to realistically gauge the risk. The inverted pyramid eventually tumbled.

There is hope, Morris claims, but only with increased regulation of the financial markets. And only if American consumers, too, can curb their tendencies to spend with so much borrowed cash.

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“The idea of a publication that changes format and continually morphs and redefines itself is intriguing” – Variety

Intriguing and continually morphing in every imaginable way, Visionaire is an art and fashion publication issued in numbered, limited editions, three times a year since 1991. For each issue, artists, photographers, and fashion designers work with Visionaire‘s editors to interpret a particular theme and produce a volume in a format that’s unique to that issue – and generally unlike any format encountered in a traditional print publication. Each volume is visually rich and pretty irresistible; you want to pick it up and look at it, touch it, even play with it. One issue of Visionaire actually requires employment of your taste buds.

The MIT Libraries own a number of these extraordinary volumes, and their diverse formats and themes illustrate the variety in the series as a whole. Volume 50 “Artist toys,” for example, consists of a set of 10 nesting dolls designed by Alex Katz, Kurt Vonnegut, R.Crumb, and other artists, while Volume 54 “Sport” is a “wearable publication” housing 3 Lacoste polo shirts screened with photographs.

The New Yorker described Visionaire as “a creative playground for leading designers, artists, photographers, and thinkers. It’s a gallery in print. A cabinet of irresistible curiosities. A daring iconoclast dressed to thrill.” Volume 55 “Surprise” is literally a cabinet; its purple doors open to reveal several slim books. Each evokes childhood memories with its pop-up format, but each also has a decidedly modern artistic twist.

The volume for 2003, entitled “World,” gives readers a glimpse into where photographers including Craig McDean, Nan Goldin, David Byrne, Satoshi Saikusa, and 150 other contributors from around the world live, work, come from, or simply like to be. The photos are bound in orange corduroy and housed in a matching Gap tote bag created exclusively for Visionaire. MIT’s copy is number 1370 of a numbered, limited edition of 4000 copies.

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The Civil War had a major impact on MIT’s early history. On April 10, 1861, Governor John Andrew signed the act of the Massachusetts Legislature establishing the Institute. Exactly two days later Fort Sumter was attacked, and the conflagration began. Of course MIT’s opening would be delayed.

But the nightmare at the root of the war – slavery – was already an issue of importance to MIT’s founder, William Barton Rogers. His personal library, now part of the MIT Libraries’ special collections, includes tracts condemning the practice. This particular antislavery volume is inscribed to Rogers by its author, Moncure D. Conway, an important abolitionist: “Professor Rogers, with cordial regards of his friend The Author.”

Conway, a native Virginian, made it a point to stress his Southern roots in his abolitionist writings. His views left him an outcast from his community and his own family, and he moved often, to such places as Ohio, Massachusetts, and England, where he spent many years.

His family home in Virginia is now a National Underground Railway Network to Freedom site, in recognition of Conway’s effort to assist many of his father’s escaped slaves in their journey to Ohio and freedom.

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Until late in the 20th century, once an MIT student had determined a major – say, physics or mechanical engineering – he or she would purchase a relevant handbook, with the expectation that it would serve as a handy and valuable reference tool for years and years. For mechanical engineers it was Marks’ Standard Handbook; chemical engineering majors bought Perry’s; for physicists it was CRC.  The MIT Libraries also bought copies of these and many others, all of which saw heavy use.

But the handbook paradigm has shifted. The Libraries still purchase handbooks, but they’re made available largely online, since such “quick lookup” material works so well in digital format. Unlike their counterparts from as recently as 20 years ago, MIT students today are unlikely to purchase a print handbook regardless of their discipline. When they need the data contained in a handbook, they hit their laptops.

Our entry for 1863 is a charming example of what was once an indispensable tool for the engineer in the field or at the office. With its quaint title and its price both stamped in gold on a nicely textured cover, the handbook is a compact, convenient, and handsome object. It lists squares, cubes, sines, and cosines, and contains formulae pertaining to roofs, boilers, railways, lighthouses, and so on.

Francis Campin wrote prolifically on engineering topics, and the Libraries own at least a half dozen of his titles. This one, he confidently claims, offers in its 192 pages “all that is commonly required” for the practical engineer.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. did it all: doctor, professor, poet, novelist, BFF with Emerson and Longfellow, and 19th century superstar.  He’s remembered for coining the term “anaesthesia,” as well as for noting – before the articulation of germ theory – that doctors themselves could serve as unwitting disease carriers. As an author Holmes was popular and esteemed; his poem “Old Ironsides” is widely credited with saving the USS Constitution from the scrapheap.

This is an extended version of a lecture in which Holmes instructs a new Harvard class of doctors-in-training to discard the dangerous, discredited assumptions of the past. Holmes presents an overview of medical practice in accessible but colorful language that the general reader can enjoy even today. The members of the incoming medical class who’d been privileged to hear the lecture “unanimously voted” to urge Holmes to publish it – and here it is.

MIT’s copy is inscribed to “Mr. Thomas Gaffield, with the kind regards of O.W. Holmes.” Gaffield, a Bostonian, performed notable research on glass, and owned an important commercial glassworks. A member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was also an MIT trustee. This volume came to MIT along with Gaffield’s large and important library of books on glass and glassmaking.

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