Something nice in the attic – Mark Avery

My home is not just a study area for a year-long bioblitz and the site of numerous repairs and improvements to the outside of the house it also houses an ongoing decluttering project.

We have the clutter collected over a combined nearly 14 decades of life; books, music cassettes, videos, trinkets, things to hang on the wall, more books, clothes that used to fit, shoes, ties, socks with holes in them, photographs, even more books and heaven knows what in the attic. Well, we know some of what is in the attic – boxes of old journals, many from the 1970s-90s but also, I find, some from much earlier to which I must have offered a home long ago. I suspect that the 1933 volume of Journal of Animal Ecology may well have been acquired in Oxford and moved into our attic in this house 27 years ago since when it has never been seen.

It’s not that easy to repurpose a pile of scientific journals so I’m looking at rehoming or recycling. I’d much rather rehome the volumes from 1932 and 1933 (and all the others) but I feel that they are destined for recycling. I can’t quite bring myself to put them straight in the bin (and they would more than fill a large bin with what I know we have (and there may be more!)) but that will probably be their fate, unless any reader of this blog knows of an institution or individual who would like them.

But for now, I can flick through them and read a few old scientific papers. Many of the names from the early 1930s are familiar: the great Charles Elton as an editor and papers by the likes of the great David Lack and the great Reginald Moreau as well as the great WB Alexander. The papers are mostly descriptive and quite easy to understand; they mostly lack statistics and any sort of complicated mathematics, and they are written in English rather than over-elaborate jargon.

Maybe fate decreed that I should dip into them now as much for pleasure as education. But they’ll have to go some time soon, certainly in the next decade.

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