Afterword

I was first ‘introduced’ to Stevan Pavlowitch thanks to Hurst sometime in 1993. A freshly arrived refugee from the former-Yugoslavia, unsure what to do with life and yet to begin my university studies in history, I was wandering the streets of Covent Garden when the Africa Centre bookshop on King Street caught my attention. Among the various books on African topics stood a biography of Tito, written by someone obviously of Yugoslav origin, but the spelling of whose surname suggested he had lived outside Yugoslavia for considerably longer than me. It was a Sunday afternoon, the only time I was off work (as a busboy and a barman in London clubs and pubs), and the bookshop was closed, to my disappointment. I stared at the book display for what seemed like a long time, excited and emotional, probably wondering who was Stevan K. Pavlowitch, what did he write about Tito, my (our?) former president, and why would an African cultural centre sell a biography of Yugoslavia’s late leader....

Ether and Modernity

This book is a snapshot of the ether qua epistemic object in the early twentieth century. It shows that the ether was not necessarily regarded as the residue of old-fashioned science, but often as one of the objects of modernity, hand in hand with the electron, radioactivity or X-rays. Instrumental in this was the emergence of wireless technologies and radio broadcasting, which brought the ether into social audiences who would otherwise have never heard about it. Following the prestige of scientists like Oliver Lodge and Arthur Eddington as popularisers of science, the ether became common currency among the general educated public. Modernism in the arts was also fond of the ether in the early twentieth century: the values of modernism found in the complexities and contradictions of modern physics provided a fertile ground for the development of new artistic languages, in literature as much as in the pictorial and performing arts. The question of what was meant by ‘ether’ (or ‘aether’) in the early twentieth century at the scientific and cultural levels is also central to this book. The chapters in this book display a complex array of meanings that will help elucidate the uses of the ether before its purported abandonment. Rather than considering ether as simply a term that remained popular in several groups, this book shows the complexities of an epistemic object that saw, in the early twentieth century, the last episode in the long tradition of stretching its meaning and uses.

Identifying the Most Popular Entry Routes into a Public Library Using GIS Can Be a Tool to Increase Ease of Navigation and Identify Placement of Marketing Materials

Objective – To evaluate and measure how patrons physically navigate entry routes within a public library and determine whether GIS is a useful instrument for this purpose. Design – Unobtrusive, covert observational study. Setting – Medium-sized public library in the United States. Subjects – 1,415 patrons were observed as they entered the library. Methods – Routes used by patron cases were selected as the unit of analysis. Patron cases were either individuals entering the building alone or groups entering the building together. Patrons were observed from a stationary and unobtrusive location. ArcMap (GIS software) was used to develop the floor plan instrument on which entry routes were recorded and then later analyzed. The paths analyzed were limited to what was considered the “entry area.” Data were collected during three separate one-hour periods for six consecutive days in the fall of 2008. The researcher chose three purposive one-hour time samples with the intention of distributing them across the library’s opening hours. Main results – The 1,415 patron cases used 195 unique routes that were recorded from the two entrances of the facility, with the east (right) entrance accounting for 83.3% of the cases (n=1178). Two entry routes were consistently the most popular overall and across each of the sample days. The next-most-popular entry routes did not remain constant across the total observed cases and each day’s observed cases or across the sample days. Over 75% of all observed patrons used 22 of the 195 entry routes: 7 routes were used by 30 or more cases each (n=836, 59.1% of all cases), 4 by 20 to 29 cases each (n=95, 6.7% of all cases), and 11 by 10 to 19 cases each (n=159, 11.2% of all cases). The route to the circulation desk was the most popular entry route for patrons. The other most popular route passed toward the rear of the library, but the observer could not record the final destination(s) of that route due to the restricted viewable area. Conclusion – The study helped the researcher to establish what areas would be ideal locations for the placement of marketing materials and a book display. Knowledge of popular entry routes can also be useful in identifying routes that could be enlarged to ease patron navigation. GIS was shown to be a useful mapping instrument for recording and analyzing routes taken.

WHAT ARE YOU READING?

It's Easter and, two years out of three, that means it is also the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, this time at the appropriately named Renaissance Hotel (in the absence of a chain of Early Modern Hotels) in Washington, D.C. Never mind about the plenaries and panels and seminars, many of which were outstanding; all conferencegoers, whether Shakespeareans or not, know that the real excitement is to be found at the book display. Was this what King Lear was talking about when he suggested to Cordelia they would spend time in prison talking about “Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out”? And the unseemly scenes on the last morning, when many publishers reduce their prices rather than ship the books back to the warehouse, are remarkably reminiscent of Harrods's china department on the first day of the sales.

Forms of Self-Representation in Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery

Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901) is one of the most famous American autobiographies, yet it is unfortunately also one of the least analyzed. Compared with the American autobiographies that we frequently study and teach, it seems meager and unchallenging. Unlike Whitman and Thoreau, Washington does not propose experiments in form, and he does not undertake a profound inner exploration as his text unfolds. He is not keenly conscious of his competitive relation to the autobiographical writings that have preceded his own and unlike Henry Adams and Henry James, he does not manifest a high degree of selfreflective awareness about the act of telling the story of his life. Nor does Washington's book display the sophisticated rendering of personal and public life that W. E. B. DuBois manages in Dusk of Dawn (1940), the subtle and disturbing account of black adolescence and early maturity that Richard Wright crafts in Black Boy (1945), the stylistic vigor and intelligence that James Baldwin demonstrates in Notes of a Native Son (1955), or the explosive energy that Malcolm X unleashes in his autobiography (1965).