User:Jim.henderson/Nerds were nerds

Something I put in Quora, 2020 August 31:

How did people get detailed information on any topic before the internet?

Jim Henderson

Twentieth Century nerds spent a lot of time in libraries. They were treasure houses in a time of wonderful new information dissemination, a time of of greatly expanded book publishing. The second half of the century featured a huge expansion of magazines. In the 1960s my local Junior High School library had the New York Times and Herald Tribune, and books about meteorology, cryptography, paleontology and other fun topics. It had Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia and, on a more advanced level, Collier’s. Candy stores had comic books.

Senior High library had industrial magazines for recent information about the new Space Age, and books about physics, astronomy, history, and other fun topics. Scientific American was a marvelous source of understanding about many newly growing topics. For deeper background, Britannica. Bookstores had paperback spy novels. Public Library had books about linguistics, geology, many things.

In the 1970s I could afford to buy my own McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology and New Columbia Desk Encyclopedia, but still spent a lot of time at Engineers Society Library near the United Nations, and at the grand 42nd Street New York Public Library. Ah, Room 315! Sacred temple of learning! Flipping through the cards in the card catalog drawers. Eagerly awaiting the call number for an early 20th century corporate bureaucrat’s memoirs, on crumbling pages held together in an envelope closed by a red ribbon. Cranking the microfilm reader for newspapers from shortly before I was born or sometimes more distant times. Also spent some hours in the Periodicals Division on the main floor, and occasionally the Map Room.

Ships of wood, men of iron. Nerds were nerds! Now it’s a world of mental wimps who expect everything to be easy. On the other hand, my creaky old brain doesn’t learn as quickly as when it was young and lively, so I fit pretty well into such a world. The last class I taught at the 42nd Street library was almost half a year ago, in one of the research rooms on the second floor. I love training bright young minds; to some degree I envy them but just a little bit I pity them for missing the excitement of a bright young mind in a harsher but more romantic version of an age of reason.

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Jim Henderson Editor, photographer, and coach, Wikipedia Editor and photographer, Wikipedia at Wikipedia Editing2006–present Studied Technology at New York Telephone Lives in Manhattan