Today's acquisitions:

Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. By Dimitri Gutas. A very interesting look at the project of mass translation of Greek books into Arabic that was undertaken in Baghdad during the Abbasid dynasty from the 8th to 10th Centuries A.D.. Gutas' argument is that the conventional explanations for this undertaking - that it was either the concerted efforts of Syriac Christians to try and convert their neighbors or the good works of a few enlightened, forward-thinking souls here and there - fall woefully short of explaining why the Abbasid elite would invest the equivalent of billions of dollars over an extended period of time, not just a few generations but more than ten. A patron was checking this book out at the desk when the title caught my eye; after he left with his copy, I checked the catalog to see if we had any other kicking around the Harvard system. And so we did, at the Fine Arts Library. Yoink!

Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar. The 1975 reprint of the definitive 1889 text. Let's see if I can't teach myself I thing or two about this mysterious language that seems always to be one step ahead of me in my studies of Ancient Greek.

Now all I need is a job where all I do is sit at a desk all day and read books. Hey, wait a minute!