Meghan McArdle suggests—as a time capsule—looking back in the order history to see what the first thing you bought from Amazon was. On May 21, 1998, she says, she bought The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Miss Manners’ Guide for the Turn of the Millenium.
An interesting experiment. I looked it up, to find that my first order was June 11, 1997, when I bought four novels: Moo by Jane Smiley, Straight Man by Richard Russo, Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card, and The Dean’s List by Jon Hassler. I think it must have been while I was writing an essay about academic novels for the Weekly Standard.
How about you? What did you first get from Amazon?
May 4th, 2010 | 9:45 pm
February 8, 2002
Leo Tolstoy– Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth
Dostoevsky– Netochka Nezvanova
May 4th, 2010 | 9:58 pm
October 29, 2001:
Josef Pieper – In Tune with the World
Josef Pieper – The Concept of Sin
Josef Pieper – Living the Truth
Josef Pieper – Enthusiasm and Divine Madness
Walker Percy – Lost in the Cosmos
Peter Brown – Augustine of Hippo: A Biography
Servais Pinckaers – Morality: The Catholic View
Karol Wojtyla – Love and Responsibility
Eamon Duffy – The Stripping of the Altars
Wow. That was a pretty good batch of books.
My first order from Amazon.ca, which I have mostly used since, was placed on November 28, 2002, and consisted in just one book: Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers.
May 4th, 2010 | 10:23 pm
I’ve never ordered from Amazon. They kept telling me my card was declined, my card company kept telling me they never received any authorization query from Amazon — so I took my business to Powell’s.
And I’ve never regretted it.
Kamilla
May 4th, 2010 | 10:53 pm
Wow, you guys are such intellectuals. I used Amazon, back in those days, for books I needed for work—and for pulp science fiction.
May 4th, 2010 | 11:20 pm
March 9, 1997 Shadows of the Empire (Star Wars)
I’m not proud. Nor can I remember what the novel was about. However, even now, 341 Amazon customers give it 4 1/2 stars. So it couldn’t have been all that bad.
:)
May 4th, 2010 | 11:26 pm
November 19, 2000, a recording of Stravinsky’s Dances Concertantes
May 4th, 2010 | 11:56 pm
Also June 11, 1997!
How Proust Can Change Your Life — de Botton
The Untouchable — Banville
Modelling Fixed Income Securities and Interest Rate Options — Jarrow
Introduction to Bayesian Inference in Econometrics — Zellner
May 5th, 2010 | 12:46 am
Jim–SNAP! JB
May 5th, 2010 | 12:54 am
July 24, 1998: Leon Kass, Ethics of Human Cloning. I bought it as part of the research I was doing for my book Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America.
May 5th, 2010 | 8:57 am
February 26, 1998
Harold J. McGee, On Food and Cooking : The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
What can I say? I like to eat.
But my second purchase gives me away.
March 17, 1998
Brent B. Welch, Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk
I am also a technogeek. (I check out all my science fiction from the library. It’s much cheaper.)
May 5th, 2010 | 9:56 am
January 6, 1999. Ordered “Christian Mythmakers” by Rolland Hein, & “In the Fullness of Time” by Paul L. Meier. Both of them ordered because my brother gave me a gift certificate & I was interested in the books. No academic interest at all!
May 5th, 2010 | 10:42 am
October 22, 1998: Phil Davis, Beyond the Zone System.
May 5th, 2010 | 12:13 pm
On March 9, 1999, I purchased “The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace and Marketplace,” by Thomas Petzinger, Jr.
May 5th, 2010 | 1:45 pm
John Le Carre’s “The Tailor Of Panama,” in June of 1998. One of his worst.
May 5th, 2010 | 2:03 pm
baby naming books, cookie cutters and Singapore math for my homeschooled kids.
May 5th, 2010 | 2:48 pm
Dave (Blum)–Oh, yeah, wasn’t it bad? I’d forgotten what a disappointment The Tailor of Panama was, how it marked the moment when one realized that Le Carré was never coming back to the high form of the early books.
Actually, a more revealing time-capsule might be the used-book services that started up online around the same time. I remember sitting down and, in one session, buying all the books that had been on my “To Find in Used Bookstores” list for years.
May 5th, 2010 | 3:48 pm
July 24, 1997 “Protestant Versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdigate and the Nuns” by Arnstein.
May 5th, 2010 | 7:40 pm
Oct. 1998: PJ O’Rourke, Eat the Rich.
May 5th, 2010 | 10:21 pm
Dec 12, 1997 Pfitz by Andrew Crumey
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