[alt-photo] Re: books before 1977

[Alberto Novo]

> One thing I will say--I keep my biblio in chronological order, and there is a real...lull...in alt stuff when modernism was the rage.  I have my file folders in 5 year periods, and from let's say 1940-1980 it wasn't really popular and my files are thin or empty and then 1980 on fat.  Now THAT's a real scientific way to calculate interest....

I have made this type of research some times, the first was when I was 
gathering the bibliography on mercury analysis for my thesis about in 1975. 
The increasing interest towards the environmental research was visible by 
the graph of the number of articles vs. years.
The same about the number of patents on blueprint: a bell-shaped figure,  
peaking in 1937 with 8 patents in that year and reaching zero in 1945 due to 
the conversion from blueprint to whiteprint.
Although not really fully scientific (you can miss an article, etc.), it is 
a good starting point for qualitatively figure the evolution of a 
phenomenon.
If you (and Judy, and whoever has a good file of specialized bibliography) 
have time, try building such an histogram ranging from 1900 up to present, 
then let me say. For a better understanding, it should be normalized to the 
world book production. 

Alberto