| Jeremy
Michael Norman began his career in the antiquarian book trade in 1964
at the age of nineteen, working as the assistant to the packing clerk
at John Howell-Books, the venerable Dickensian bookshop that used to
exist near Union Square in San Francisco. Designed in the style of
Bernard Maybeck, this shop had been founded by John Howell in 1912.
During the five and one-half years that Jeremy worked there, the shop
was operated by John’s Howell's son Warren,
one of the last great antiquarian booksellers to deal across the entire
spectrum of antiquarian books and manuscripts on all subjects.
Returning to college to avoid the Vietnam War,
Jeremy received his B. A. from the University of California , Berkeley
in 1969, majoring in history with an emphasis in the history of science.
In 1970 he started Jeremy Norman & Co., Inc. in San Francisco in its original
location on the second floor of a building next to John Howell-Books.
In 1990 the office was moved to 720 Market Street. In 2001 the office
moved to its current location in Novato.
One of the world’s leading specialists in rare
books and manuscripts on the history of medicine, science, and technology,
Jeremy is the author of the fifth edition of the standard annotated
bibliography of the history of medicine and biology: Morton’s
Medical Bibliography (1991), and the co-author, with
Diana Hook, of The
Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (2
vols., 1991), which has become a standard reference work on classics
in these fields. In addition to buying and selling rare books and
manuscripts on all aspects of the history of medicine, science,
and technology, Jeremy does many appraisals of related material
for purposes of insurance, estates, and donation to non-profit institutions.
Related to the history of computing and the
Internet, in 2002 Diana and Jeremy published Origins
of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking, and
Telecommunications. In 2005 Jeremy published From
Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information
Technology. Since publication of this book
Jeremy has continued and widened his research on the history
of information in the From
Gutenberg to the Internet Timeline which he is building
on this website.
"This web timeline project is an outgrowth of research methodology
that I originally developed to edit and expand Morton's
Medical Bibliography. That 1100-page book covers a relatively
wide range of subjects--basically the landmarks in all of the history
of medicine and biology, chronologically by subject, so you can see that
I am comfortable with tackling historical data on a wide scale. However,
the Internet provides access to so much more information that I have
undertaken a much larger project in the web timeline -- documenting landmarks
in the history of information from the first records circa 30,000 BCE
to the present. The G2I Timeline is a way that I can incorporate my career-long
interests in the history of books, printing and libraries with my interests
in the history of information technology. Along the way I am bringing
in material on various related topics such as the history of
information survival and loss. This is the historical background
of the central problem facing digital libraries today--how to make
sure that digital repositories will remain useful and accessible to future
generations. Ensuring the accessibility of digital information is a new
problem because digital repositories are so new, and because of the
complexity of the technologies, the rapid evolution of software, and
the uncertain durability of storage media. By contrast, the format of
the codex changed only incrementally since its adoption around 400 CE,
so that apart from issues like language or legibility, most information
recorded in books and manuscripts is
still accessible to us if it survived over the centuries. That
is one of the advantages of information stored in physical form. But
information stored in books and manuscripts was lost for many other reasons.
As I research this topic from the beginnings
I am continually impressed both with how little information
remains from certain periods, and also
with how much actually survived over the centuries, considering fires,
floods, wars, and socio-political upheavals.
"The G2I web timeline is, of course, an open-ended project. As a timeline
everything is arranged in one chronological order. Instead of providing
only annotated references to publications like we do in bibliographies,
I can provide links to the actual publications on the web, to articles
about publications, articles about people, and so on. The possibilities
are endless. This sort of project would have been essentially unfeasable
before the web since there would have been no way to gather the current
information efficiently and I would have had to spend decades in libraries
before I had accumulated enough historical material. However, without
all the innovation, excitement, and convenient accessbility of the web
I would not have been motivated to make the study. One current limitation
of the timeline is that we do not yet have a way to index it by subject.
You can jump to date ranges using any of the 24 date buttons. You can
use the search engine to search by name, date or any key word or key
word combination. Eventually I will figure out how to sort it by subject
as well."
Jeremy’s writing and collecting interests cover a wide range of
topics from prehistoric archaeology, to anatomical illustration in the
Renaissance, to the history of aviation, rocketry and space exploration,
to the history of manuscript and printed book production. |
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Jeremy Norman
E-mail: jnorman at jnorman.com
Phone: 415–892–3181
Mobile: 415–225–3954
Fax: 415–276–2317
Click on photos for larger image
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