Books Index

The books came first, and they were heavy. A single copy of a sequence-analysis manual could cost a month's stipend, so a lab kept one and guarded it. You signed it out. You photocopied the appendices you needed and returned the rest. The good volumes were dog-eared within a year, their margins filled with corrections to algorithms that the second edition would quietly fix.

We keep this index because the texts themselves are scattering. Most predate any clean digital form; what exists online is often a bad scan of a worse photocopy. A bibliographic record outlasts the object. When a paper from 1998 cites a method by page number in an edition no library still shelves, that citation has to resolve to something. This list is that something—author, edition, year, and where a physical copy was last known to sit. Not the books. The record of them.