At the end of the month, my brother celebrates his birthday, so, in the spirit of good big brotherness, I ask him what he wants for his birthday. After some consideration, he answers with what is surely the hot-ticket item for the newly-21 crowd: a copy of “Racism in the United States: A History of the Anti-Miscegnation Legislation and Litigation,” a USC grad school dissertation from 1979.
Uh, okay.
So I got my roommate Alex, who still works at USC, to snag a copy from the library and bring it home, so I could photocopy it. Well, we started running into problems when the library listed three entries for it. Because it was three volumes long. Additionally, the library provided the rather quizzical addendum that it was 29 centimeters thick. At this point, I was of the opinion that perhaps I can just drop it at Kinko’s and run away.
Undeterred, Alex ordered it online and picked it up from the library. The librarian tried taking it off the shelf gently, tipping the spine so that it would fall into his hand, and was caught wholly unprepared. Unable to actually get the thing to budge, he instead started to clear other books from the shelf until he could wiggle the 3 volumes out. Alex toted it across campus with no shortage of grousing, and abandoned it on my bed as soon as fate would allow. Thus, upon entry to my room, I found this. I moved it about, and found that the books altogether weigh around 6 pounds. Not a comfortable weight. Furthering the misfortune, copyright information is blazoned across the opening of the book, so Kinko’s wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole.
Nevertheless, my brother deserves presents for his birthday, and given that this is his heart’s desire, I set to work on taking photos of each page. I did summarize it a bit, but I think my scanning work remains true to the spirit of the book.
The beginning.
The middle.
The end.
I would like to point out that the book is 1402 pages long, with additional notes going on to page 1694. I feel no shame in my chronicling efforts.
Happy birthday, Jeremy.