Weeks ago, I put in for an interlibrary loan for a book by W.W. Jacobs, Dialstone Lane. Jacobs was a writer of sea-themed yarns, but he's famous for the classic horror short story "The Monkey's Paw" (Project Gutenberg text). I was only interested in the introduction to this particular book, and this introduction only appears in a 1947 edition. Only a dozen libraries in the world have one, and one of those twelve consented to loan me theirs.

Whether it was the slow-boat holiday season mail, or the less than fourth-class postage libraries use, it took weeks. Weeks of cursing the Ewe-Ess Pea-Ess. Weeks of kicking myself for not requesting photocopies instead of a loan. For not just spending fifteen bucks and buying a copy online, sight unseen. The last few days I would go through the library's mail the moment it was delivered, pawing through packages, lamenting every postmark. North Carolina, no. Maryland, no. Alabama, no! Who the hell requests books from Alabama?

Today, there was a catastrophic power failure to the library server, leaving us with lightning-fast internet connections and no way to do any real work. And today, today my book arrived.

Title page | page v | page vi | page vii | page viii

The book is out of copyright, and Dialstone Lane is available online. But, as I said, I was only interested in the introduction to the 1947 edition. And, unlike Stanford U., I don't have a $125,000 book scanning Swiss robot in the basement of my library.