Such indirection is the essence of scholarship. My research benefits from the informed and systematic zeal with which the resourceful book acquisitors of Harvard College Library have, for generations and with the help of generous donors, collected all scholarship fit to print. I am drinking from wells that I surely did not dig. And so, as I will explain, do my students. Those who come after us will, I hope, have reason to be just as grateful even when, feeding on electronic discs, they do not remember us.
Local scholarship has a limited market and appears in small editions.
If a library does not buy such books when they are published, they will never become available again. One of my aims in doing theater research is to make it a respectable historical discipline. The Theatre Collection in Pusey Library is splendid. My students and I use it gratefully. It is, on the other hand, not easy to concentrate in theater at Harvard.