The International Optics Design Conference
collocated with
The Conference on Optical Fabrication and Testing
June 10 – 14th, 2010
Jackson, Wyoming
Book cover design for selections from the Rolland-Thompson Collection of Antiquarian Books in Early Optics and the Related Sciences
It is almost upon us: the International Optical Design Conference (IODC), which I feel provides us a snapshot, every four years, of the state of “our” industry—optical design. The modern revival of IODC began in either 1980 at Mills College, in the Bay area, or, as some may say (mostly those that were there) at a precursor conference in 1975 at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Since I entered the field in 1976, I missed the Haverford conference, although the founder of Optical Research Associates (ORA), Tom Harris, was there; I will share his insights on that event in a later posting. In 1998, I was the IODC co-chair with Leo Gardner, when the conference was located in Kona, HI. The preconference site visit made for a particularly good “assignment” that year.
Beyond a full contingent of papers, of which I and my wife, Prof. Jannick Rolland of the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester, are authors and/or coauthors of quite a few this time around, there are a couple of exciting events that I have been coordinating, with important and significant backing from ORA. First, at IODC we will announce the Rolland-Thompson website for antiquarian books in optics, a project in cooperation with KirtasBooks (provider of book digitization and print-on-demand services) and ORA. The mission of the site is to make printed copies available of rare and out-of-print optics and other science books, at a reasonable price.
As I described in an earlier posting, there was a period of some 10-15 years in the pre-Internet days when I was acquiring very to extremely old books in optics and optical design, one volume at a time, while I traveled throughout the US and England. At the time, I was looking for Coddington’s original work, published in 1828. Early on, I discovered that optics books that were very important to the fields of optical design and physics—such as Airy’s Undulatory Theory of Light (1848)--were languishing on crowded and dust-covered shelves in bookshops well off the beaten path, often at extremely reasonable prices. My copy of Airy was purchased in the desert outside of Phoenix, in a bookshop of unpainted cement block, one door, and one window that was 99% filled with tattered paperback books. There at the back of the store was a single, three-foot shelf of hardcover books. Imagine my surprise at finding on that shelf the only copy of Airy I have ever seen on the market. As I brought the copy to bookshop owner, he remarked that I was buying “the only book that brings any sense of respectability to this establishment.” He then rang up the charge of $8.50. It is worth noting that although I did collect over 500 books in optics, physics, and astronomy written before 1930, I nearly never, in 15 years, saw a book twice, and I rarely found more than five books in any one place.
Returning to IODC: if you come early to visit ORA Engineering’s booth, we will have a complimentary copy of Airy’s book available for you to take away. Although some rare optics books are available online through Google scholar, having a printed copy on the shelf is, for some of us, still very attractive. At IODC, we will describe the process for ordering from a current list of over 125 volumes, dominantly in optical design. The current criterion is simply that the book is in the collection and it has an expired copyright, which means earlier than 1921, with some titles reaching back to the 1700s including works by Descartes and Euler. The pricing system is very attractive, and any and all revenue will be used exclusively to expand the collection. A majority of the original books are now found on the first floor of the Optical Sciences Center at the University of Arizona, which generously agreed to house them when they outgrew the space at my home. Now, through links that will be posted at Optical Research Associates, the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences, the University of Rochester Institute of Optics, and KirtasBooks, in Victor, New York, the volumes will be accessible in a number of formats including electronic download, for a nominal fee of a few dollars, a print-on-demand soft-cover at an average price of about $15 (nothing over $25, I believe, with the potential exception of Robert Smith’s Optick’s, which may be the first book on optical design in (olde) English, 1728, and over 800 pages with many fold out prints, being processed at Kirtas this week and certainly one of the few truly expensive books in the collection), and even a print-on-demand hardcover with a somewhat higher (but still extremely reasonable) price structure.
Looking forward, I will be reading a number of the books for the first time myself and writing up interesting discoveries. Also, shortly, the list of the books is expected in a condensed format to publish here, along with the web link.
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