Periodical Room

These memories sometimes come to me in a flash.

The periodical room was a discovery for me. The look and smell of an old time university library periodical room. There were rows of metal shelves with issues of periodicals laying flat in piles on them. I didn't even know the word periodical before that. I must have gone there to look at poetry magazines, like The Paris Review, but I found out that there was a whole scholarly journal devoted to the work of William Blake. I'm pretty sure this was before college, and I started college at 17, so I could have been 15 or 16 when I made this discovery. 

My father was the editor of The American Sociologist. I had some idea, then, of the existence of scholarly journals. My mom helped him to correct proofs, and at least once I helped them. I would read aloud very fast from the original document, while one of them was following along in the proofs. It was all in this hideous social science jargon, full of abstract nouns and clunky syntax. But the Blake journal seemed a marvelous thing to me, its mere existence, that is, of existence of specialized knowledge like this.