Two of the books I took from Howard's office had no particular connection to anything, they just looked interesting. One was Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now: Six Inventions that Made the Modern World, and the other was Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F.B. Morse by Kenneth Silverman.

The other two are a little more significant, and are pictured below.

On the right is a copy of the 1967 Harvard Library edition of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000–1887, which is one of the seminal works of American utopianism. As the numbers in the title suggests, it's a faux retrospective from the year 2000 back to 1887, the year in which it was written, describing how American society developed into Bellamy's vision of an ideal civilization. This was not just a work of speculative fiction; Bellamy and some adherents of his book's vision were sincerely committed to at least try to bring it about. (They failed, of course. Utopianists always do.) Howard's doctoral dissertation was on technological utopianism in America, and he often referred to Bellamy in the parts of his classes that were about utopian visions and what he viewed as the fallacy of the "techno-fix". I have to assume this book, and probably this particular edition of same, was one of his key references while developing his own identity as a historian.

On the left, and even more significant to my eye, is the 1989 first edition of Technology in America: A Brief History, the textbook he cowrote with a colleague from another university. I have the second and third editions (the second from when he used it in class, and the third just because), and I was surprised to find this left behind on one of the shelves in his office, because, well, see that label in the lower right corner? It's an author copy of the first edition. Those notes taped to the cover are about planned revisions to go into the second edition. The interior is full of penciled notes about paragraphs to keep, cut, or modify, and corrections that need making (such as the line where the typesetters erroneously cast Apollo 11 as "Apollo II").

I can only assume it was overlooked amid the jumble (which, to be fair, I'm not sure what led my eye to settle on it, nor what prompted me to pick it up and investigate closely enough to realize what I'd found), and/or just not relevant to the research interests of the others in the department who'd passed through the collection, but... wow, man. As a memento of the man, I'd rather have that than... pretty much anything else in there. I'm amazed it was still there for me to find, this late in the game.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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