Reading room

The reading room is the older half of this address. Where the register summarises documents other people published, these are pieces written here: about card-play and gambling literature, about a handful of novels, about how books reach readers, and about the craft of publishing on the web. They are longer than a review and shorter than a study, and they assume a reader who has come for the subject rather than for a recommendation.

They are listed by date because that is how they were written and how the older addresses for this site reached them. Nothing here is a ranking and nothing is a buying guide.

The largest group is about card play and the literature that grew around it, and it is the part with the clearest subject: a handful of books between the late 1950s and the 1990s turned blackjack from a game into a counting problem, and the essays trace what each one actually established rather than repeating the legend that has grown over them. Thorp proved the count could be beaten; Wong reduced the method to something a person could carry in their head; Griffin did the mathematics properly and in doing so set the limits; Snyder wrote for the player who has to do it in a real room with a real pit boss. Reading them in that order is the point of the piece, and the order is the argument.

A second group is about books as objects and as a trade — how they reach readers, what a publisher's imprint still signals, and what happens to a text once it is loose on the web. The third is narrower and more technical: essays about publishing itself, including one on responsive design that is old enough now to be read as a record of what the problem looked like when it was new.

Two of the essays are about single novels rather than a field, which is a deliberate exception. They are here because the argument in each is about how a book was received rather than about the book alone, and that is a subject the rest of the room is already about.