Adventures in engineering

The wonder, the wonder...

Continuing my theme of posting about things I did at the weekend, today's will be a short paean of praise to the wonderful Foyles on Charing Cross Road. Any Londoners who read this blog might think, So what? Well, it's because before Monday I had never visited this temple to the bookseller's art. And it is a temple! Long gone are the days when the books were sorted by ISBN; today the books are grouped into sections and then filed alphabetically by author. I've been in large bookshops before - Hatchards and Waterstones on Piccadilly, for example - but never felt such a sense of excitement before. The design is functional, rather than comfortable, but I would far rather browse there than, say Borders.

In the section on engineering, for example, there were two bays of books on geotechnical engineering. Two whole bays! I spent over an hour browsing those shelves, and inwardly jumping up and down* to see the variety of texts. These ranged from the standard soil mechanics and foundation engineering texts to much more abstruse works from specialist publishers. I would have liked to have bought more than I actually did, but these books aren't cheap: I couldn't afford to browse there too often!


* I'm aware that this is making me sound a bit sad...

posted by Tamburlaine @ 5:32 pm