Two nights ago in London, Brian Eno and I did the second in what I hope will be a long series of public conversations at the wonderful ICA. It was a very special night, and I think everyone seemed to enjoy the discussion, which roamed from Joseph Priestley to the British art school scene of the late 1960s to Twitter and the iPhone application environment. I gather the ICA will upload a podcast of it shortly, and I'll link to that when they do.
But my favorite moment of the night came at the very beginning, when Brian announced that, after reading Invention of Air, he had sat down and tried to figure out what it would have been called, had it been released in Priestley's day, using the more elaborating titling conventions of the era. This is what he came up with:
Being
a dissertation on the Life and Works of Dr Joseph Priestley of Leeds,
including a Survey of his Experiments with Gasses; his Affiliations
with the Revolutionary Forces in America; his Diverse Religious
Heresies and subsequent Trials at the hands of the British; with
digressions into the Formation of Coal, the History of Organic life on
Earth; the effects of Energy Flows on Human Affairs; the Discovery of
Ecology; all construed within a Novel Account of the Evolution of Human
Knowledge.
I think that sounds just about right. When we go back for the next printing of the paperback, we'll have to make that change.
I would have loved to come, unfortunately it was sold out!
Posted by: Giulia | November 04, 2009 at 05:58 AM
If you're going for that style, remember to add another ten pages or so to the dedication.
Posted by: Richard | November 04, 2009 at 06:22 AM
I love those old titles. I work in palaeontology, and one of my favourite titles is for a paper by J., W. Hulke, "Iguanodon Prestwichii, a new species from the Kimmeridge Clay, distinguished from I. Mantelli of the Wealden Formation in the S.E. of England and Isle of Wight by differences in the shape of the vertebral centra, by fewer than five sacral vertebrae, by the simpler character of its tooth-serrature, &c., founded on numerous fossil remains lately discovered at Cumnor, near Oxford." You hardly feel you need to read the actual paper after that.
Posted by: Michael P. Taylor | November 04, 2009 at 06:38 AM
Funny, that's also what someone working in search-engine-optimization would have advised naming the book... or at least the first paragraph on the website about the book.
Oh, by the way, now that it's been out for 9 months, you might want to add "The Invention of Air" to your right margin list of your books on this blog. It currently lists "The Ghost Map" as your newest book.
Let me help you out with that:
http://tr.im/Amazon_Invention_of_Air
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Posted by: vokey wedges | November 20, 2009 at 08:06 PM
An amazing classic title by Monsieur Eno— "with digressions" and "all construed" made me laugh out loud, serving as such perfect segways. In addition, we need more commentary about "Diverse Religious Heresies" in our world today.
Posted by: John Lavitt | December 17, 2009 at 05:41 PM
I loved the Discovery of Air, which I got for Christmas, but I agree that it would have been significantly enhanced b y such a subtitle.
Mike Taylor, these days that would be the Abstract, no?
Posted by: chris y | December 31, 2009 at 01:53 AM
Many institutions limit access to their online information. Making this information available will be an asset to all.
Posted by: Citing Outside sources | January 01, 2010 at 11:14 PM
Way long ago in a different life, I wrote my doctoral dissertation(at Brandeis)on Joseph Priestley's materialist theory of cognition. Your INVENTION OF AIR has been not only a pleasant reminder of those days of immersion in Priestley's life and thought, it has tied together a number of other strands in my own life and thought. I especially appreciated your discussion in Chapter Three of the connections between history and "intensifying energy flows."
Posted by: Dharman (Robert) A. Rice | January 21, 2010 at 05:48 AM
It was in your Invention of Air that I found out what Priestley was worried about when he asked Benjamin Franklin for advice, with Franklin replying with his famous letter describing his "moral algebra."
You might be interested in http://timvangelder.com/2010/03/15/st-ignatius-on-decision-making/ where I discuss a precursor to the moral algebra found in St Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises
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Posted by: AguirreWillie21 | March 25, 2010 at 04:30 PM
Your talk at the Cosmos Club was both very informative and entertaining, the best way to keep an audience in hand, as it were. I am almost finished reading the book and here pick a bone with you. As a laboratory physician and pathologist, permit me to note the DNA evidence over Jefferson and Sally Hemmings does not prove he fathered some/all of her child(ren) but does establish that someone in the Jefferson line did so. There are other "usual suspects" to borrow a line from Claude Rains (p. 175). The suggested revision of the title would place it squarely in the style of the early 19th century tome.
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