Book collecting  

The prof I was closest to as an undergrad was seriously into book collecting, so much so that now he's become the director of the Lilly Library at IU, where he continues to collect everything from pop-up books to the original manuscript of On the Road. I'm actually hoping to make it down to Bloomington sometime this summer to take a look at some of the Spanish-Aymara dictionaries and other Aymara vocabulary materials in the collection - there's quite a history to some of these documents, and some of the most significant ones are at the Lilly. No Aymara-English dictionary though; that doesn't exist yet.

I came across a bit of a collectors item (to me, at least) today at Potbelly of all places, on my way home from class. It's an old (the edition is 1961, but it's not the first) intro economics text by Paul Samuelson, one of the University of Chicago's finest economists. I read a couple of articles by Samuelson for my political economy class last year and they were quite dense, but not so this text. Instead it's as an intro text should be, but with that pleasantly condescending air that I imagine all textbooks from that era had. And it's a historical document - it provides a wonderful snapshot of the state of the art at that time, complete with charts and graphs and references to President Eisenhower. There's the explanation of how the US income tax was progressive, with the top tax bracket paying 87 cents on the dollar to the govt - and then the insight (new to me) that almost nobody paid that rate, because the tax system created incentives to invest rather than earn monster salaries. And then there's the chapter entitled "Fiscal policy and full employment without inflation." Sounds like one to read and enjoy.