Give us your old physics books!

At the Niels Bohr Library & Archives (NBL&A), my fellow librarians and I aim to preserve and make known the history of modern physics and its allied fields. The legacy of this mission is visible in our robust archival, photographic, and book collections, which are available to researchers across the world.

Our strong collections wouldn’t exist without generous materials donations from physicists, historians of science, and their families. We’re grateful to our many book donors over the years for helping us fill in the gaps in our collection. We received more than 1500 books from donors in 2013 alone—a record year for us!

Collecting donated books allows the researchers who visit NBL&A to trace the progression of scientific thought throughout various editions of a title. Shown below are five different editions of the textbook Modern Physics by Charles E. Dull, H. Clark Metcalfe, and William O’Brooks. Over the years, donors have separately donated these 1939, 1949, 1951, 1955, and 1964 editions.

• Present at the Creation: the Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider by Amir D. Aczel
• American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
• The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family by Peter Byrne
• A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming by Paul N. Edwards
• The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo
• Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science by David Lindley
• Keep Watching the Skies! The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age by W. Patrick McCray
• The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek
• The Road to Yucca Mountain: the Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States by Samuel J. Walker
• The Universe in a Mirror: the Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It by Robert Zimmerman

Despite our record-breaking year, we continue to seek book donations. Besides what might be termed mainstream physics, our collection additionally covers astronomy, optics, vacuum science, rheology, meteorology, crystallography, and physics in medicine, as well as institutional histories and social commentaries on the scientific community. Within these subjects, we collect textbooks, laboratory manuals, instruction manuals, conference proceedings, instrument catalogs, published correspondence, and biographies. We have a particular interest in usefully annotated books.

Your contribution will help us document the history of physics and its scientific relatives. But before you consider donating, please do any of the following to determine whether we already have a copy of your book.

1. Consult our complete book catalog .
2. Send us a list of your books, including author, title, publisher, and year of publication. We’ll check the titles and let you know what we need.
3. Arrange a phone consultation.
4. Ship your collection to us if it’s small. We’ll then go through the books and either sell or return duplicate copies.

Donations are the foundation of our book collection. If you are interested in donating books to NBL&A, or have questions, please contact Elaina Vitale, Assistant Librarian, at evitale@aip.org .