Gordon Wood, Office Decorator

This video from Book TV about Brown University historian Gordon Wood’s (three!) work spaces is a little like HGTV for the overeducated. Wood shows us how he organizes his home library (“Helter-skelter” is one category) and demonstrates how to rationalize effectively when your department boots you out of your office because it doesn’t have room for emeriti. (“There are some advantages,” he says of his alternate digs in the bowels of the university library. “There are no phones.”)

My favorite moment comes around 5:39 when Wood shows us the box of 5x8 note cards that became The Radicalism of the American Revolution. You can almost hear the gasps of thousands of junior American Studies faculty.

Next week: Gary Wills hems his drapes.