I love books even though I rarely find time to read them. I have an old Audubon book, “Birds of America” that my wife found for me at Savers for five dollars. It is not the best bird book in any modern sense. The illustrations are no longer the highest-fidelity option available. Folks could argue there are better books now. It’s a book of the past. It’s also one of my favorite books.
The book has weight. It has authority. It represents a particular moment in the history of that changed how people approached the illustration and documentation the natural world, and that matters independently of whether a newer book has sharper images or more current labels. Some objects keep their value because they are still optimal. Others keep their value because they have become history themselves and still deserve a place on the shelf.
Growing up I could never imagine a book on programming to stand for long. Every week my local Borders book store computer section shuffled in the newest version or shiny technology. Headfirst in the HTML4 only lasted a month. Each subsequent definitive guide never lasted long enough to collect a light layer of dust. Over time I started to learn more about the community, its jokes and lore. A book rose above the others. For me, that book is The Art of Computer Programming.
Donald Knuth began publishing it in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when computer science was still defining itself as a field. The books are dense, difficult, and famously uncompromising. People joke about them as shelf trophies, the kind of thing someone owns to signal seriousness and experience as if to say they read it cover to cover. That joke is only partly fair. The books are unreadable in the casual sense, but they are not empty. They are full of the kind of low-level, structural knowledge that tends to outlast fashions.
I think that that is part of why the books have survived so long. It is not just a historical object. They still contains ideas worth preserving. Were I able to really consume its contents I’ve no doubt I would level up in my own programming skill.
Knuth also gained some fame outside of those few who were to books target audience for something that sounds like a prank but is really a statement of values: a bug bounty of one hexadecimal dollar. If someone found an error in his work, he would send them a check for $2.56. The amount is small enough to be absurd and specific enough to be memorable. The check became part of the folklore. So did the fact that people kept them. That feels right. The point was never the money.
I have been in this field a long time, and I still cannot say with honesty I understand The Art of Computer Programming in the way I understand a practical programming manual. It has always been more aspiration than reference text for me. In middle school I’d read technical books. Over and over again kind of hoping I would grok it eventually. These books are outside my reading level but none the less I wanted a copy. Not a pristine collector’s edition. Not something I ordered on purpose. Just a cheap secondhand copy from a place like Savers or Goodwill, the kind of book that had already lived a life before it reached me. Maybe even a copy with highlighter marks.
Two days ago I was driving through a parking lot near Half Price Books when I looked out the window and saw an employee helping someone unload a stack of books onto a gray trolley. On top of the pile, facing me, in tiny print, was The Art of Computer Programming.
I only spotted it because I recently got new glasses.
I stopped the car, startling the women, rolled down the window, and asked theme whether they were selling the books or had already bought them. They said they were planning to sell them. I pointed at the stack and said I wanted that one, to hold it for me, and that I would be back in a minute after I went to the mailbox.
I came back before they did and gave the store my name and number in case the books were sold. The person behind the counter wrote it on a sticky note and said they would hold the book if it came in. I excused myself to leave thinking I didn’t want to pressure her into a sale because I asked to buy one of the books. However just as I was turning around the older woman and the employee came in with a cart piled high with books.
She book seller smiled at me. I smiled back. We talked briefly. She asked what I did for work. She mentioned that her boyfriend had been into computers too. He had died recently, and she did not know what to do with his books. She had assumed nobody would want them. Seeing me get excited about the chance to buy some of the books outside the store raised her spirits. I excused myself before even getting her name which I regret. She smiled and waved goodbye as she turned back to the counter. Happy to know the books would live another life.
That is the part that matters most to me. Not that I found the book, though I did. Not that it was cheap, though it was. Not even that it is now sitting on my shelf looking exactly as good as I hoped it would. The point is that books are not only containers for information they are history itself. They are what remains when someone cared enough about a subject to leave a physical trail behind.
Last night the store called right before closing and said the books were on hold. This morning I drove back to pick them up.
Now it is on my shelf. I can barely read it. Maybe someday I will be able to. For now, that seems like enough. An aspirational goal. An ecclesiastical relic which will one day find its way onto another enthusiasts shelf.