the book collector
one form or another, numbers are with us every moment of the day. We love them, we hate them, but we cannot live without them. And there is more to it than mere usefulness. To some people they have become an obsession and comprise a branch almost of religion in their unknowability. May such thinking be correct, that numbers have some lofty presence that cannot be explained? We cannot say. We will never be able to say. A charming novel by the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor , approaches the subject in this way: We tried picturing the square root of negative one in our heads: √ -1. The square root of 100 is 10; the square root of 16 is 4; the square root of 1 is 1. So, the square root of -1 is… He didn’t press us. On the contrary, he fondly studied our expression as we mulled over the problem. “There is no such number,” I said at last, sounding rather tentative. “Yes, there is,” he said, pointing at his chest. “It’s in here. It’s the most discreet sort of number, so it never comes out where it can be seen. But it’s here.” The sale of the extraordinary, other-worldly library of Erwin Tomash was in two parts: Part 1 (Mubashir Ibn Ahmad al-Razi to Babbage) was on Tuesday 18 September 2018 and Part 2 (Babbage to Turing) on the following day. The intellectual quality of the cataloguing was supreme, as befitted the subject. Tomash (d. 2012) and his wife Adelle (b. 1925) founded the Charles Babbage Institute and with the help of Professor Williams, drew up and fulfilled a strategy to form a collection that would, in e V ect, describe the mechanisation of mathematics. The sale did them proud. If a time comes when we need to reacquaint ourselves with the fundamentals of computer mathematics, the texts that were on sale in the old Aeolian Hall will be counted as the incunabula. Stephen Massey reports on the details of the sale on p. 849. it has become our custom to report on the appearance of the various volumes of the late Gershon Legman’s Autobiography of Innocence Peregrine Penis (see, for example News & Comment, Winter 2016, 568–9; Summer 2017, 311–13). Now volume 4, Musick to my Sorrow (published by Createspace, 2018: isbn 978-1984077745) has thudded onto our shelves. We use the verb advisedly. It amounts to 598 pages, which means that it has now taken nearly 3,000 pages to get our hero almost through his twenties. This might not matter if Legman’s life was as interesting as he evidently felt it to have been. There are
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