Welcome to the home of Borogove Books. Lewis Carroll defines a borogove as "a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round--something like a live mop." Our book-reading borogove, drawn by the late San Francisco cartoonist Phil Frank (after John Tenniel's classic illustration from Through the Looking Glass) is the new bookstore mascot. It expresses our sense of fun, without which surely nothing is worth doing. As of April 2012, Borogove Books is eight years old. So far, we have emphasized quality rather than quantity in our listings. We have sought the books most valued by specialists and collectors, and have accepted only books that are in "very good" or better (mostly better) condition. These policies are good for business and make the bookstore a fun and interesting place to work--and also, we believe, a fun and interesting place to shop. We hope you'll agree!

We Are Always Buying Books!

For your convenience, and because we don't have an open store, we come to you! We will make offers on any lot of books, from single copies to entire libraries. We want to make your book-selling experience as convenient and profitable for you as possible.

Featured Books: Thomas W. Dibblee, Jr. (1911-2004)

In the early eighties I was a graduate student in geology at UC Santa Barbara.  One of the department satellites was Tom Dibblee, a legend in his own time.  Tall and lean, with weathered skin, a modest demeanor, and a friendly smile, Tom was in his early seventies.  He was extremely fit from a lifetime of field work, and he was known for going in the field with much younger men and walking them off their feet.  In a lifetime of mapping the geology of California, he amassed a legacy of geologic maps covering forty thousand square miles—about one fourth of the state.

I took a graduate field seminar, taught by John Crowell, and Tom usually came along for the ride.  He would bring along his field maps of the areas we visited, and pull them out to refresh his memory or to illustrate a point. Sometimes he would take out a pencil and make a note or correction to one of his maps.  Referring to his iron-man reputation and his penchant for doing geology wherever he went, graduate-student humor sometimes took the form of pointing to a distant ridge and asking “isn’t that Dibblee up there?”

One of Tom’s best-known contributions to his field was his 1953 paper with Mason Hill, in which they asserted that there had been "at least 350 miles of right-lateral displacement since Jurassic time" on the San Andreas Fault.  At the time, there was no generally accepted mechanism for large lateral displacements; it was not until 1965 that the theory of plate tectonics began to emerge. In a seminal paper of that year, John Tuzo Wilson recognized that strike-slip faults might be plate boundaries.

This might be a better story if Hill and Dibblee had not advanced a wholly inadequate explanation of the lateral displacement.  But that’s the way science works.  The facts (Dibblee’s field work indicating lithologic units offset by the San Andreas Fault, the older units being farther offset than the younger ones) are sacred and therefore invite an explanation.  A publication would seem incomplete without at least a cursory stab at an explanation; therefore one must be included.  No harm is done; when the true explanation is found, the original faulty (pun intended) explanation is forgotten as if it had never been.  Only the historians of science will remember it.

I have been cataloging some remains of Thomas Dibblee’s library, and have several monographs by him and/or owned by him, including a few offprints of that classic 1953 paper, “San Andreas, Garlock, and Big Pine Faults, California: A Study of the Character, History, and Tectonic Significance of their Displacements”; and an earlier paper on the structure of the San Gabriel Mountains by Hill, with Dibblee's name on it.  To find these, and others from Tom Dibblee's library, do a Quick Search with “Dibblee” as author or as a keyword.  Happy hunting!

- Tim Walker