Used Book Search Engines and Hipstorical Research

I have always loved the research aspect of my job. Studying for prelims was like genuflecting at the altar of knowledge. The library gave me a carrel, I filled it up with books, and locked myself into it for 9 or 12 hours a day, with breaks for e-mail checks back in the Department lab or a cup of coffee. I could follow footnotes, prowl the dusty aisles for unknown collections of key journal articles conveniently anthologized for the historiographer, and browse lateral materials for a more cliotheorized knowing of the field at hand. In this way I read the slavery studies, labor history, urban history, and History of the West that coursework never gave me an opportunity to pursue.

It is a tantalizing game, such a life of the mind, and there are many libraries I could muse about: The Allentown Public Library, Muhlenberg College's domed cathedral, Williams College's stacked laminate cubby holes, the Bronfman Science Center's quiet reading rooms on the same campus, or my favorite, the soaring UCSF library overlooking Golden Gate Park.

I have lived in NYC for almost five years now, and traumatized by the contrast between Sebastopol in June and the WTC in September 2001, still have not ventured into either the CUNY Graduate Center or the Public Libary at Bryant Square. This is what happens if you listen too deeply to the security warnings about potential subway threats -- inertia, phobia, that "state of fear." Why I take the bus more of the time than not.

So at the moment, I am entranced with the possibilities of keyword searches in the commercial second-hand book market made possible by databases and independent book sellers. My favorite terms -- hippies, counterculture, Haight-Ashbury, and M.G's conceptual label of "psychedelic beatnik" -- all routinely bring up new and inspiring facets on the popular texts which circulated "freak" styles and values from the bohemian outposts of artist quarters and academic circles into the consciousness of mainstream America.

I began with a book I already possessed a photocopy of: Burton H. Wolfe's The Hippies, which I had discovered in the University of Florida library during the Spring Break of 1994 and madly copied into a well-thumbed, awkwardly stapled collation stored in one of the most battered of my files' manila folders. Allan Cohen told me later that the cover photo, which he called "The Hippie Madonna," was controversial in and of itself. But that is a story for the dissertation.