So, my brother is working on a project in the middle of Alaska. There is a store that that has literally thousands of books in the basement. Old books. Like… many have Klondike era import (to AK) dates. And printed well before that. So he texts a pic to my eldest, an avid reader. A bookworm who has 4 years of Latin for her foreign language. He sends her a pic on an ancient tome and asks if she like to come up and pick up fifty pounds of hundred-year-plus old books. The book is one of a set of four in Latin, in Alaska, been there a long time. The kid darn near is vibrating with excitement. BOOKS! OLD BOOKS!!!! ANCIENT, even! No idea what it says (not great at Latin, but she can read it properly and recognize some of the root words, but details are lost), but it’s very cool looking. She’s too busy to go right now, but… yeah, she’s a nerd of the best type, the book-nerd. By luck, hard work, skill, or the grace of God she seems to have turned out pretty well.
Wonderful!
I have had my own encounter with some nerds similar but different: two teenagers who are slide rule collectors.
If they not only collect them, but geek out on how to use them with Log and trig tables, now THERE is geekery of the highest order! Glad to know such people are still around. Was that a recent thing, or a “back in your youth” thing?
Recent. One was last year, the other started a couple of years earlier when she did a high school class project show-and-tell about how slide rules work. So yes, “how to use them” is definitely part of that.
For that matter, I use them too, once in a while. But then again, I’m a “gray beard”. Still, I’m retro enough to amaze the exam proctors at my amateur radio license test when I pulled out a slide rule to solve some of the questions on the exam. That was in 1987, but still by then that was considered unusual.
Log tables, now *that* is seriously obscure. In high school I had to use those, and of course celestial navigation tables are a closely related thing. Speaking of which, do you know how to do celestial navigation? I think every SF writer should know that. I even have a SF short story vaguely tied to that, though so far no one has accepted it for publication. 🙁