By Stuart Mitchner
A recent study in the journal iScience reports that between 2003 and 2023, the proportion of Americans who “read for pleasure on a given day” dropped by around 3 percent each year: “Reading reached its peak in 2004, when around 28 percent of individuals reported reading for pleasure. But by 2023, that number had dropped to 16 percent.”
I’m trying to process this news as I look forward to the October 10-12 Friends and Foundation of the Library Book Sale. During my roughly 20-year-involvement in managing the event, I thought of it as a community adventure that helped fund the library. While people who “read for pleasure” undoubtedly show up every year, the most significant support comes from the dealers and collectors who arrive early on preview day and pay ($25 this year) for the right to have the first look.
Having Fun with Dirac
Topping the list of featured rarities at this year’s book sale is the first edition of P.A.M. Dirac’s The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, which is priced very, very high. Since it’s hard to imagine much reading pleasure to be had in this tome published in 1930 by Oxford University Press, I settled for reading the wikipedia entry on Paul Dirac (1902-1984). For residents of Princeton who have lived here long enough to remember the Annex Restaurant on Nassau Street, which closed after 60 years in 2006, it’s amusing to find that Dirac was “the lonely looking man at the next table” when he met his wife there in 1934. In his wikipedia photo, Dirac at 31 has a dashing, “lean and hungry” look, as if were already savoring the Nobel Prize he shared two years later with Erwin Schrödinger, “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory,” a citation that brings to mind the July 2023 premiere of the biopic Oppenheimer at Princeton’s Garden Theatre.
Born in Bristol
What gave me added pleasure while reading about Dirac was finding that he comes from a city my wife and son and I think of as a second home. Not only was Dirac born in Bristol, he attended primary school with Archie Leach, better known in later years as Cary Grant. Dirac’s father taught French and his mother was a librarian at the Bristol Central Library. After studying electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Bristol, he received a scholarship to Cambridge, where he explored the theory of general relativity, completing his Ph.D. in 1926 with the first thesis on quantum mechanics “to be submitted anywhere.”
Reading Dirac
In 1995, Stephen Hawking stated that “Dirac has done more than anyone this century, with the exception of Einstein, to advance physics and change our picture of the universe” In a 1926 letter, Albert Einstein himself is “toiling over Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful.” In another letter, he confesses, “I don’t understand the details of Dirac at all.”
Following Dirac’s death in 1984, his childhood home in Bishopston, Bristol was commemorated with a plaque, a nearby street was named Dirac Road, and a marker inscribed with the Dirac equation was unveiled in Westminster Abbey. No surprise, Einstein has the last word, even though he predecased Dirac by three decades. After not understanding the “details,” he eventually admitted that “to Dirac we owe the most logically perfect presentation” of quantum mechanics.
Reading for Pleasure
I’m still thinking about “reading for pleasure” thanks in part to the fact that Dirac once reportedly faulted Oppenheimer for reading poetry: “The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.” With all due respect, as Tony Soprano might say, Keats didn’t intend “Ode to a Nightingale” to be difficult or incomprehensible. He wrote it to be read for pleasure.
Open Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics at random and try to find “difficult things” being made “understandable in a simpler way.” Now open Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium and ask yourself if the way he goes playfully and sometimes incomprehensibly about his art makes the joy of reading him any less? During my happiest years as a reader, I underlined passages that gave me special pleasure, but not for the reasons given by the ninth grade teacher who on the first day of class held up a civics textbook that had been underlined to within an inch of its life and announced, “This is what your book should look like if you expect to pass this course.”
Waiting for Pynchon
While I look forward to reading Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Shadow Ticket, which was formally published on Tuesday October 7, the pleasure will be in finding things of interest to write about here, a weekly task that challenges and stimulates me, and brings in a fee hundreds of dollars less than the cheapest seat at a Taylor Swift gala. And if I find pleasure in Pynchon, as I usually do, so much the better; it’s a perfect “have your cake and eat it too” situation.
Curating Auspicious Dates
Sometimes I see myself as a Dickensian curator of auspicious dates celebrating famous people, most of them long gone and yet still active, thanks to my companion A Book of Days for the Literary Year, edited by Neal T. Jones, which I must have found at a book sale in the late 1980s. The book’s only introduction is an epigraph from Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “…each day like a year. A year whose days are long.”
On October 8, today’s date, most of the page is taken up with a photograph of Virginia Woolf smoking a cigarette in a holder as she stares bleakly in the direction of the equally sized matching photograph of Edna St. Vincent Millay on the facing page, October 9, surrounded by magnolias, each hand clasping a branch as she stares moodily in the same direction. What happened to each writer on the day in question? On October 8, 1924, Woolf finished Mrs. Dalloway and on the same day seven years later completed The Waves. On October 9, 1950, Millay died at 58 in Austerlitz, NY.
Among the authors whose books are featured in this year’s sale, including first editions and some inscribed copies: Theodore Roethke, Aldous Huxley, Sylvia Plath, Ian Fleming, James Clavell, Ludwig Bemelmans, Yiyun Li, Philip Roth, Jimmy Carter, and Fran Lebowitz.
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Book Sale Facts
The 2025 Annual Friends and Foundation Book Sale is dedicated to the memory of Claire and David Jacobus, Friends and supporters of the library and the Princeton community. The event opens with a Preview Sale on Friday, Oct. 10, from 9 a.m. to noon. The first 40 tickets for the Preview Sale will be $25 per person, and the next tickets will be $5 per person. Numbered tickets will be available at the door starting at 8 a.m. Customers enter the sale in numerical order, and the number in the room at any one time will be limited to 40 throughout the Preview Sale. Barcode scanners will be permitted at the tables, but collecting books to scan will not be allowed.
Starting at noon, admission to the book sale is free for the remainder of the sale. Hours are noon-5:30 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday; and noon-5:30 p.m. Sunday. when everything will be sold at half price.
For more information, contact Claire Bertrand, Friends and Foundation Book Sale and Annual Giving Manager, (609) 924-9529 ext. 1227, or cbertrand@princetonlibrary.org.