I thought, ‘wow that’s brilliant’, but then I sadly also thought ‘he can do that because he’s Andrew Abbott’.

At a time when being up-to-the-minute is touted as a virtue, what does it mean that one reviewer praises the book for being “without a hint of trendiness”?I didn’t get a theory out of this material, but I got lists of every possible contingency that could happen to a psychiatrist (like being killed by his patient), of all the sanitaria in the US (which often turned out to be the same buildings under many different names), of the kinds of people who tended to start private mental hospitals, and so on. And for students who think we’re crazy when we say “Why don’t you read 400 things for your comps list and then decide on 30 to actually be tested on” We can now point to Abott’s book and say: This is how The Quality does it. And of course, that scholar probably looked at three or four more books before choosing the one charged. They have no idea they need to comprehend Hobbes’s argument, and then respond to the argument, not to the bits from which it’s made.

If you’re not a well published highly regarded superstar academic, you’ll keep being asked to refer to more and more (often not relevant) literature by journal editors etc.As for me, I simply hope that there are a few real libraries left and a few real scholars left to work in them, producing real thoughts, in an artisanal manner, for the purpose of truly understanding their world. But serious scholars, who want their work to stand the test of time, will appreciate Abbott's unique, forthright approach and relish every page of Digital Paper.

It’s very hard work to keep really focal attention on detailed material where you are looking for rare things.And 450,000 items over 2,920 days means that more than 150 times a day some scholar found something he or she wanted to charge on the shelf—not in storage. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account.