Add to the very long list of why libraries are wonderful things: the Oregon State University library has put up an electronic repository of Linus Pauling's lab notebooks - you can browse through digital photographs of each notebook page. I don't think they've got all of the notebooks up yet, but they seem to have ones covering quite a span of Pauling's career.

I've browsed through some stuff from 1922 and 1923, when Pauling was doing X-ray crystallography. I've done just enough X-ray crystallography to appreciate the painstakingness of Pauling's work there. These days when you do X-ray crystallography, an electronic device captures all of the diffraction patterns, and a computer can do most of the calculations automatically. Pauling had to do all those calculations in his lab notebook.

My favorite page so far has got to be this one, where, at the very top, Ava Helen Pauling wrote, "I LOVE YOU," in tiny block letters.

I find this particularly endearing, because I must own a dozen notebooks containing declarations of affection scrawled in the margins or inside the cover by Daniel. Not, as far as I can recall, any of my lab notebooks, which in any case all reside (to the extent that they've survived) in the various labs I've worked in, and not with me. But in notebooks containing class notes, fiction writing, or in my working journals (which I suppose are sort of like lab notebooks for my tech writing and other geeky projects), sure.

It's nice to know that in the fairly unlikely event that a university library ever decides to digitize my notebooks, these marginalia won't be considered at all odd.