I read a lot of books, pinballing amongst genres and across disciplinary declevities as I please, and investigating some very odd (or at least infrequently-visited) corners of the print world. Mostly I don’t try to inflict my idiosyncratic tastes on others, but sometimes a book comes along that’s just too good not to make a fuss about. Today’s case in point:
Alex Wright’s Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age.
Paul Otlet is probably not a person you’ve encountered before (and if he’s already familiar to you, I’d like to know how), but he belongs in the same visionary realm as Melvil Dewey (of library cataloging and 3×5 card fame), Ted Nelson (who instantiated hypertext), Tim Berners-Lee (pater of the World Wide Web), Doug Engelbart (of Mother of All Demos fame), Vannevar Bush (Memex and As We May Think), JCR Licklider (Man-Computer Symbiosis, ARPA), and a clutch of others (Watson Davis, Patrick Geddes, Emanuel Goldberg, Otto Neurath, John Wilkins) who will probably also be new to you. These people are arguably the primary architects/engineers/makers of the electronic world we all inhabit. The book is especially commended to
- anyone interested in the history of Information, and the precursors of the Web in particular
- anyone engaged with European intellectual history, and/or with the world of the first 50 years of the 20th century
Other books I’ve read that I’d put into the same heap, and reread in light of Wright’s book:
George Dyson Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence
James Gleick The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
John Markoff What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
David Weinberger Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
I’m just starting Wright’s Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, and hoping for More Of Same.