What can sales of second-hand books tell us about public and professional interest in the history of microbe hunting?

Bernard Dixon

Copies of Penicillin, Its Practical Application, edited by Sir Alexander Fleming and published by Butterworth in 1946, sell for surprisingly high prices at the upper end of the second-hand book trade. Yet those written by Selman Waksman, from Principles of Soil Microbiology (Baillie`re, Tindall and Cox, 1927) to The Actinomycetes (Chronica Botanica, 1950), hold very little value nowadays.

Having been involved in the out-of-of-print book business for over a decade, I still find this type of contrast surprising. Working at St. Mary's Hospital, London, in the late 1920s, Fleming was, of course, responsible for the momentous initial discovery of penicillin. Yet his overall contribution to the advent of life-saving antimicrobial drugs was far less extensive than that of the Rutgers University microbiologist Selman Waksman.

Why, then, the disparity in the present-day popularity of their books? There are probably two explanations. The first indicates ways in which the second-hand book trade reflects wider social interests and attitudes. The second says something odd about both public and professional perceptions of the history of microbiology.

The subject matter of new books obviously mirrors readers' interests at the time of publication. In contrast, that of today's out-of-print books reflects those of a decade and more ago. This is as true of medicine and science as it is of other topics. Second-hand bookshop shelves remind us of the leading singers, actors, sportspeople, and politicians of yesteryear. They also reflect both important happenings such as the emergence of Lassa fever in Nigeria in 1969 (commemorated in John G. Fuller's Fever!, Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1974) and also the oddities of once-popular health gurus and longforgotten cult diets.

One reason for the high importance attached to the Fleming book (though it was not even written by him) is that for the past half century he has been an iconic figure. Fleming is the name attached to the world's first miracle drug. Although penicillin was developed as an antibiotic by Howard Florey and his team in Oxford, their names remain comparatively little-known. In part because Florey refused to speak to journalists, the entire credit for the new wonder drug went to Fleming. The crowning moment was publication of The Life of Sir Alexander Fleming, written by Andre´ Maurois (Cape, 1959), which virtually deified the dour Scots bacteriologist.

Later, much more realistic accounts, including Ronald Hare's The Birth of Penicillin (Allen &Unwin, 1970) and Gwyn Macfarlane's Howard Florey-The Making of a Great Scientist (Oxford University Press, 1979) and Alexander Fleming-The Man and the Myth (Chatto & Windus, 1984), had nothing like the same impact on the public imagination. Similarly, while Selman Waksman did write My Life With the Microbes (Simon & Shuster, 1954), as well as The Conquest of Tuberculosis (University of California Press, 1964), these books never became what dealers call "landmark" titles. An online search today throws up three times more copies of the Maurois book than either of those by Macfarlane.

Landmark books in science are those whose titles and/or authors' names are familiar not just to scientists but to most general readers. It is quite a heterogeneous category because it includes both unquestioned classics such as Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and The Descent of Man and also Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and virtually anything ever written by Albert Einstein. Alexander Fleming is in there. Selman Waksman is not.

If some might find this situation depressing, another generalization to emerge from an analysis of the second-hand book trade is rather welcome. This is that many of the titles that caused a sensation (to the annoyance of many scientists) when they first appeared are worth very little today. One example is Somatic Selection and Adaptive Evolution (Williams & Wallace, 1979), in which E. J. Steele claimed that he had found neo-Lamarckian inheritance at work in the immune system. Another is A New Science of Life (Blond & Briggs, 1981) in which Rupert Sheldrake argued that living organisms are shaped by "morphogenetic fields" not recognized by conventional biology or physics. You can now buy a first edition of Neville Hodgkinson's AIDS, The Failure of Contemporary Science (Fourth Estate, 1996), subtitled How a Virus That Never Was Deceived the World, for a dollar. Like the flurry of popular books in the 1970s on paranormal metal-bending, these heterodox offerings have sunk with little trace.

The other factor that probably accounts for the disparity between the Fleming book and those of Waksman is the way in which they are categorized. Dealers' catalogues invariably list Fleming under medicine. Waksman, if he is there at all, appears under the very much less attractive labels of nonmedical or soil microbiology. And judging by second-hand book sales, infectious disease is of considerably more appeal to collectors than any other branch of microbiology. This is paralleled in the case of biographies of pioneers and histories of institutions.

So historical books about antibiotics and immunization, and about Edward Jenner, Robert Koch, and Paul Ehrlich, sell well. Those covering topics such as nitrogen fixation, marine microbiology, and the fermentation industries are exceedingly slow movers-indeed they scarcely appear in second-hand book dealers' catalogues at all. In this context, the names of Martinus Beijerinck, Serge Winogradsky, Jan Kluyver, and the "Delft school" are unknown.

Virtually the only historical work dealing with nonmedical microbiology that is bought and sold nowadays in the antiquarian book trade is Louis Pasteur's Études Sur la Bière, first published in French in 1876 and as an English translation three years later. But it is invariably portrayed as a medical work rather than one dealing with fermentation in brewing and the various things that can go wrong with the process. It was, of course, Pasteur's genius to see that there might be an analogy between various "diseases" of beer, each caused by a specific microorganism, and particular infections in humans.

Just as there is an insatiable appetite for new books describing horrendous pathogens today, real and imagined, so there is continual interest in books about historical epidemics and their impact on society. In contrast, old texts on fundamental microbiology-for example the physiology, biochemistry, and genetics of microorganisms- are of scant interest to collectors. Even a first edition (Longmans, 1930) of Bacterial Metabolism by Marjory Stephenson, who largely founded the subject of bacterial biochemistry, is now almost unsaleable.

The inevitable conclusion is that, quite apart from popular books, professional microbiologists too must have comparatively little interest in the history of their subject. A friend who specializes in long-out-of-print titles in the physical sciences tells me that he has a very healthy trade in those published 50-100 years ago on subjects such as quantum theory, relativity, astronomy, and cosmology. This is not true of corresponding topics in bacteriology, virology, or protozoology.

Finally, one specific and rather strange anomaly. Although second-hand biographies of Pasteur, Koch and Ehrlich remain popular, there is very little enthusiasm for those of Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic surgery. Dealers specializing in medicine and science are well aware that even the major works, Lord Lister, His Life and Work by G.T. Wrench (T. Fisher Unwin, 1913) and Lord Lister by Rickman Godlee (Macmillan, 1917) sit on the shelves unsold, year after year.

But things may be about to change, because 2012 is the centenary of Lister's death. So, just as a new movie can resurrect, overnight, the name of a long forgotten novelist, triggering demand for second-hand copies of that person's works, so centenaries can reawaken interest in nonfiction books. For Joseph Lister, the time may have come.

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