At a Philosophy Department welcome party for the new academic year last night I saw a bit more of the small world which is academe than one perhaps should. A visitor from Beersheba University (originally a Melburnian who left in 1967 and is back for the 100th birthday of an uncle) told me he'd recently written a review of a book by one of my Princeton advisors. Where, I asked? In a bilingual Canadian journal whose name he couldn't recall. How did this happen? On the bus between Jerusalem and Beersheba he met a Canadian whose daughter was spending some time in a kibbutz who happened also to be the book review editor for this journal. He had a bunch of books in his bag looking for reviewers, and so the deed was done. I didn't ask if he'd liked the book.
A young German historian of science I'd just met and I wondered later how the history of scholarship might be shaped by book review editors trawling along other bus routes, perhaps between Berlin and Leipzig or Melbourne and Canberra ... or the Trans-Siberian railroad?
