Peter Selgin's Blog

Published by Scribner’s in 1926, the first edition featured a Hellenistic jacket design illustrated by Cleonike Damianekes. The illustration, printed in a medley of beiges and browns, depicts a loosely-robed, exhausted-looking woman inclined against an even more tired-looking tree, her head resting on her shoulder, her eyes closed, both shoulders and one thigh exposed, cupping a golden apple in one hand, a pan’s pipe resting by her sandaled foot.

What this image has to do with the plot of E...

You’d leave on Friday mornings. The trip took just a little over an hour, but you might as well have been taking off for Pluto or Neptune, it seemed so very far. As your father backed the Simca around the white birch in the turnaround you’d see your mother and your brother standing there, next to the garage, your mother waving, your twin brother crying, as you would cry next Friday when it would be George’s turn.

You rode past the War Memorial, the Danbury fairgrounds, the Dinosaur Gift & Mi...

During that first year at Harvard, my fathermet a man who, had circumstances been ever-so-slightly different, would have altered the course of his professional life. That someone was an older graduate student named Howard Aiken.

Tall and handsome, with piercing, owl-like eyes, Aiken would become the force behind the world’s first fully operational general purpose computer, the so-called Harvard Mark I, a room-sized, fifty-foot colossus of camshaft and relays built by IBM to Aiken’s specificat...

Patent No. 2,646,717: The Nomoscope. “Device for the Identification of Documents or Printed Matter,” aka the dollar bill changing machine.” Atdinner parties my inventor papa wouldquip, “Yes, that’s right, I invented the first machine that gave changefor a dollar bill and never gota nickel from it.”

The story of the ill-fated “Nomoscope” is told through a series of letters and affidavits to and from attorneys, and is much more complicated than my father’s glum one-line party quip suggests. In...

I had an hour to kill before attending the reception at the Augusta Literary Festival this past Friday. The reception took place in a banquet hall in the main branch of the library. I went upstairs and browsed the fiction section, where I was drawn, inexorably, or just because I didn’t feel like stopping, past the alphabetized stacks from A through U, to the last set of stacks, where I pausedbefore the Y’s. There, on the second shelf from the bottom, my eyes rested on a long shelf of books b...

In “Swimming with Oliver,” a memoir/essay about my twenty-yearfriendship with Oliver Sacks (to be published this coming Spring in the Colorado Review), the following passage occurs:

On the way back from [a driving tour to] Canada, we discusspossible titles for Oliver’s nearly-finished memoir. He likes “The Garden of Mendeleev,” but worries that not enough people know who Mendeleev was. We come up with alternatives, including two inspired by Goethe, who wrote, “The mind, too, has its erection...

My father rarely spoke about his family.I didn’t learn that he was Jewish until after he died, when at his funeral a stranger approached me with this news. In fact he descended from two prominent Italian Jewish families.

Among his paternal uncles was Gilberto Senigaglia (when he emigratedto the U.S. my father changed hisname to Selgin). Born in Trieste in 1872, Gilbertobecamea physician, specializing in obstetrics and gynecology.

It was while studying English with him (either privately or at...

I left the petite Musée de Montmartre, forgetting my plastic bag, the one in which I carried my notebook, my glasses, my pen box, the one the museum receptionist made mecheck, eliciting a muttered remark from me to the effect that I doubted very much I could fit any of the museum’s precious relics in my little plastic bag.

When I went back for it, the receptionist looked at me over the tops of her bifocals as if I were a rare specimen of insect. “Your leetle bag is over there,” she said in sn...

I sit in my dockside chair and watch the water and the sky and the reflections that ripple in the waves as the fishing boats go by, and hear the birds and smell the air and feel the cold breeze on my face and arms, and think, “This is nothing.” And it’s true: it really isnothing. This day is nothing. This dock is nothing. Thesefeelings and thoughts, they’renothing. But they’re a good nothing, a very good nothing, the very best nothing: the kindof nothing you wish there were more of, the kind...

On the occasion of my friend Michael’s60th birthday, hisdaughter asked peopleto share theirreminiscences. My brother George wrote something beautiful.

An excerpt:

First, a confession: when asked to write to you reminiscing about old times, I was at something of a loss. The truth is that I have an absolutely terrible memory—so bad that when people tell me stories about things that happened in my own past, as often as not I have no idea whether they’re pulling my leg!

Well, I do have one recol...