Page 84 - Fall2021

My Acoustics Library
Neil A. Shaw
Some people collect hubcaps. Some people collect porce- lain. From the time of my college days to the present, I have collected books, and how I started collecting is serendipity. For some reason, I held onto the texts (and notebooks) from my days at Cooper Union, New York, NY, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and would, occasionally, acquire a new or used book for the collection. One day in the early 1980s, I was taking care of Mark R. Gander’s house, VP of Marketing for JBL Professional at the time. I noticed he had a couple of shelves filled with acoustics and audio books. I took a yellow pad and started to write down some of the titles; after noting about eight or nine titles, I wrote “All of them.” After this revelation, trips to used bookstores became routine.
Now, the time to find a new home for my library is nigh, so I contacted Acoustic Today (AT) to place a classified ad. To make it interesting, the ad was in “web” Latin in the Spring 2021 issue (available at bit.ly/32ejMOR).
At its peak, my library had over 1,600 books from the 1820s to the present. After placing the AT advertisement, Arthur Popper, the editor of AT, said he thought that members of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), and perhaps an institution, would be interested in knowing about the
content of the library because there are so many historic and classic books on acoustics and related topics. He asked if I would write an essay about the library and how there came to be so many texts: what I collected, why, some stories of a few, and a picture or two (see Figure 1) that shows a portion of the library (note that all but the top shelves are doubled stacked).
So, this informal essay is an attempt to address the edi- tor’s curiosity. Throughout my career, I traveled quite a bit, and a nice way to spend some time while on the road was to check out the used bookstores in the various and sundry cities and towns that I visited. With my interests in acoustics, audio, perception, mathematics, physics, and more, used bookstores offered an education, in a sometimes-musty environment. The 1980s were a time when many engineers and academics who practiced during the Second World War and during the Cold War were retiring and “de-acquiring” their book collections, and I was able to add quite a few classic books to my own library during that time.
During the trips, I would go to Brattle Books in Boston, Massachusetts (see brattlebookshop.com) and The Strand in New York City (see strandbooks.com) as well as to stores in many other cities. I found my first copy of Wal- lace Clement Sabine’s Collected Papers on Acoustics (1922) at Book City in Burbank, California (a review by Egan [1988] of the Peninsula Publishing reprint edition can be found at bit.ly/3ey1W01); Alfred Ghirardi’s copy of Greenlees’ The Amplification and Distribution of Sound (1939; see his brief discussion of the delicate matter of how to tell people they do not know how to use a microphone on p. 194; some things never change!) from Stevens Book Shop in Raleigh, North Carolina (via mail); one book by Dayton Clarence Miller from Philip Morse’s library was found at Brattle Books; and another of Mill- er’s books was acquired due to my being the ASA Los Angeles Chapter representative. There were other finds and surprises, but, sadly, these serendipitous moments are mostly gone.
©2021 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.
Figure 1. Part of the library discussed in this essay.
84 Acoustics Today • Fall 2021 | Volume 17, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2021.17.3.84