I am excited to announce that my next book, Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing has found a Dutch publisher. The book, due out in 2014, will be published in the Netherlands by De Bezige Bij, one of the great literary houses in that country.

In addition to publishing an impressive list, the house has an impressive history:

“The company was founded illegally in 1943, during the German occupation of the Netherlands by Geert Lubberhuizen; its fist publication was a poem by Jan Campert called De Achttien Dooden (“The eighteen dead”), which describes the execution of 15 resistance fighters and three communists. The poem was sold to raise money for Jewish children who were placed with Dutch families; when it was published, in the spring of 1943, Campert had already died in the Neuengamme concentration camp. When the German occupier rounded up students for the Arbeitseinsatz, Lubberhuizen hid in the attic of Maarten Vink, a surgeon, and ran the press from there.
The name is derived from one of Lubberhuizen’s aliases, “Bas.” After he had signed a note, “Bas (busy),” an English-speaking friend joked, “Bas, busy as a bee can be,” which led to the current name.
In 1997, De Bezige Bij became part of the Weekbladpersgroep, though it was to keep its editorial independence and its cooperative structure.” (Wikipedia)

It was fun to see this blog post from Business Management Daily suggesting that business leaders could learn from the lessons of The Philosophical Breakfast Club!

Maybe it’s time for a breakfast club

by EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP on NOVEMBER 3, 2011 5:00PM
in LEADERS & MANAGERS,LEADERSHIP SKILLS

Four British men together led the scientific world in the early 1800s through a simple device: by meeting every Sunday morning over breakfast to talk about science.

The men aimed to launch a new scientific revolution—and they pretty much did.

Charles Babbage invented the modern computer, John Herschel mapped the skies of the Southern Hemisphere and helped invent photography, Richard Jones influenced economics and William Whewell, besides coining the term “scientist,” founded three fields, including the study of tides.

Whewell, in fact, was inventive not only in science itself but in naming discoveries. To list a few, he suggested “Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene” as names of historical epochs, and coined the terms “ion, cathode and anode” in electronics.

Lesson: Bring together your peers to brainstorm on a regular basis.

— Adapted from The Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder, Broadway Books.

See the post online here.

I am extremely pleased to announce that my next book, due out in 2014, has been signed by W.W. Norton and Co. I will be working with Norton’s Editor in Chief, John Glusman, who has edited the books of many wonderful writers, including Erik Larsen, Orhan Pamuk, and Richard Powers.

My book, Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing, will use the intertwined biographies of the artist and the scientist to tell the story of the seismic shift in the idea of what it meant to see the world that occurred in the 17th century, a shift that these men (who were born a week apart in the same small city in the Dutch Republic) helped bring about.

I am excited about having the opportunity to explore further the theme of the relation between science and the rest of culture, a topic with which I ended The Philosophical Breakfast Club.

One hundred seventy-five years ago today, on October 2, 1836, the H.M.S. Beagle ended its nearly five-year voyage and returned to England. During the trip, Charles Darwin collected natural history specimens and studied geological formations, all the while writing down his observations, and some theoretical speculations, in a series of notebooks. These speculations, and the evidence he gathered, nourished the first roots of what would grow into, more than twenty years later, Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Darwin’s life and work intersected with the members of the philosophical breakfast club both before, during, and immediately after his voyage. Before he was chosen as the ship’s naturalist, he was a student at Cambridge, where he attended John Henslow’s botany lectures, often in the company of William Whewell, a fellow of Trinity College; Whewell was probably the one who recommended that Darwin read John Herschel’s book about scientific method, the Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. This book was credited by Darwin with spurring him to devote his life to science. “It made me wish to try to add my mite to the accumulated store of knowledge,” Darwin would later say of Herschel’s book.

While on board the Beagle, Darwin was able to meet Herschel in person; Herschel was at the Cape of Good Hope studying the stars of the Southern Hemisphere when the ship docked at the port of the Cape on its way back to England from the Galapagos Islands. Darwin enthused in his diary afterwards that becoming acquainted with Herschel “was the most memorable event which, for a long period, I have had the good fortune to enjoy.”

Once back in England, it was not long before Darwin met Charles Babbage. While giving a talk at a meeting of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in February, Darwin wrote to his sister that the geologist Charles Lyell was insisting that he cut his visit to Cambridge short and return to London. He “wants me to be up on Saturday for a party at Mr. Babbage,” Darwin half-heartedly complained. “Lyell says Babbage’s parties are the best in the way of literary people in London–and that there is a good mixture of pretty women!” (Darwin was then a bachelor, so this was a particularly enticing prospect.) It was at this party, at the beginning of March, that Darwin would have first seen the demonstration model of Babbage’s Difference Engine, the first all-purpose calculating machine. During this period, Babbage was demonstrating his machine at his soirees to make the point that God was something like a “Divine Programmer” who had pre-set his creation with all the future alterations necessary to bring about the origin of new species. God did not need to constantly tinker in the world, personally creating new species. Babbage’s argument dovetailed nicely with the speculations Darwin had begun while on the Beagle. It was within two weeks of this soiree that Darwin made his first comment (in one of his notebooks) suggesting that evolution of species was a real possibility.

This summer, the Librarian at St. John’s University asked several faculty members to submit a paragraph about books that have been very influential in their lives. My thoughts have just been published on the St. John’s Library blog.

Here’s what I had to say:

One book I find myself returning to is George Eliot’s masterful Middlemarch. Written in 1871-2, this epic novel charts the years leading up to the passage of the First Reform Bill in 1832, which initiated sweeping changes in the political and social structure of Britain. Like all great literature, Middlemarch is a book to return to again and again. In different periods of my life I have been struck by different facets of this book. As a high school student, hoping to become a writer, I was amazed by the quality of the writing, the way that Eliot drew the reader into the age she depicted so vividly. In graduate school, while beginning to work on Victorian era philosophy of science, I took note of the way in which science, and the new knowledge burgeoning in the time, is both revered and feared by the characters. And most recently, when I reread the book after suffering the loss of a close family member, I was most drawn to another theme of the book: human relationships, and the way that passion can lead either to perdition or salvation.