Now that’s a phrase to roll around in your head:
Spotted when on my rounds on Friday, walking around various old haunts in New York 
to check that they are still there and in good health. This was at the Strand Bookstore. It was once a wonderful place. Endless amounts of books, and piles of books all over….. All sorts of treasures to be found in the Physics and Mathematics sections.
Sadly, I found on Friday to my dismay that they’ve cleaned the place up, and moved things around. The result seems to be drastically fewer books on the shelves, in addition to no piles to step around. It is still nice, but no longer great.
The physics section was mostly full of junk, and multiple copies of second hand versions of recent popular books. What have they done with all those wonderful old technical books!? This is truly a great loss. I’m sad about that.
-cvj
Oooh dunno how I forgot this, but… before they moved to another building, the geology and astronomy departments shared the same building at my campus, with astronomy on the 5th floor and geology taking up the rest of the floors. So on the directory listings for the two departments at the bottom of the stairs someone had the sense to write “the sky above, the Earth below.” 🙂
Hilarious. As a grad student I somehow got ahold of one of those engraved door plates that must have been left over from a previous building incarnation. It says:
Astronomy ↑
I still have it in my office, just as a reminder. 🙂
Clearly, that sign was written by a neutrino astronomer!
I thought “astronomy is looking up.” No matter.
Here’s to favorite bookstores. I already miss my personal favorite in Cleveland, a nice secondhand shop where the entire second floor is dedicated to science fiction (the first floor is all the popular/fiction/whatever, and the basement is all the academic books on science, history, etc). Unfortunately printed matter is too expensive in New Zealand for me to haunt the ones here too much on a college student budget. 🙁
“As above, so below…”