A greater share of happy serendipity

In the past month I had three "Oh, I didn't realize that" moments related to authors.

The first was in regard to The Closing of the American Mind by Bloom, the second was in regard to Elizabeth Peters and the third with regard to Melvin Konner.

I took my daughter up to her university orientation and while in town visited a used bookstore. I spotted The Closing of the American Mind and purchased it for a dollar. This came out in 1987 when I was a couple of years in to my management consulting career and working 80-100 hour weeks. I kept track of headlines and was aware of the splash that The Closing of the American Mind made but had no bandwidth to read it. Later, as I got time management under control and consolidated my career and began investing more time in elective reading again, I collected more volumes than I was ever able to read. I ran through a series of Harold Bloom books, impressed by his erudition but put off by his arrogance. It was only as I reached for The Closing of the American Mind in that dusty used bookstore that it suddenly registered for the first time - Aha, by Allan Bloom, not Harold Bloom. I think The Closing of the American Mind will likely still sit a long time before I get around to reading it, but now, a shorter time than if I still were under the impression that it was by Harold Bloom.

As a young boy, 10-15, I was enamored with archaeology in general and Egyptology in particular. I recall with clarity three books that were instrumental in kindling that enduring interest. Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs by Barbara Mertz, Gods, Graves and Scholars by C.W. Ceram, and Introducing Archaeology by Magnus Magnusson. I think I purchased all three in the old Harrods department store on Brompton Road circa 1970 which at that time had a rather excellent children's bookstore. Loved all three books but Mertz's book was probably my gateway into Egyptology.

She passed away August 8th, 2013 and in reading her obituary, I was astounded to see that she had become a very prolific mystery and adventure writer from the 1970s onward under the pseudonyms Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels. Really prolific. In recent years I have taken to reading mysteries at the beach and to leaven my otherwise fairly dense reading choices. In fact, I had at some point in the past purchased a couple of Elizabeth Peters mystery novels and just hadn't gotten to them. Now knowing that they were written by Mertz, I have pulled one out and begun reading it. A wonderful mix of both Egyptology and mystery adventure. Excellent.

The final discovery was more prosaic. Melvin Kotter is a professor of anthropology at Emory University. A couple of years ago I read several chapters of his The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit, an ambitious synthesis of research in biology, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. In the past year, I picked up a copy of Unsettled, An Anthropology of the Jews. It was only as I picked it out of a stack to begin reading a couple of weeks ago that I realized it was also by Melvin Konner.

I am afraid there is no particular pattern here. Just the observation that citizenship in bibliopolis ensures its denizens a greater share of happy serendipity than others might enjoy.