spamguy

This is a first: I’ve given up trying to find a book. Ross Mullner’s Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy documents a bizarre and lugubrious tale of lax health standards in industry. 112 assembly line girls paid to coat clock faces with glow-in-the-dark paint containing radium died; countless more became consistently sick with malignancies and strange illnesses. The story is stranger than fiction, and this book is the only one that covers it in good detail. I could buy it, but at $32 and 190 pages of text, that’s $0.168 a page. I could fetch it from a library, but it doesn’t exist in any library within the city. What is this book’s biggest curse, its cost or its obscurity?

It would be dumb to make the university my scapegoat as I cry about being too cheap to buy a book myself. I don’t take for granted that a Top 10 Library exists in town: UT Austin holds 9.02 million volumes. Stunning, but drains on its budget has slowed its acquisition of books such that its spot on the list is declining. If you visit Perry-Castaneda library, the budget crunch is visible before you enter the building. Both front automatic doors are broken and administration has confessed that repairs cost more than the budget allows. On the inside, wall sockets for laptops are a luxury commodity. It’s unfair to pin blame of one missing book and Carter-administration furniture on sports, but I am willing to claim that a sustained library budget over the years nips a lot of problems, missing books included, in the bud.

Radium Dial Worker may yet exist within the state. If you have a UT ID, perhaps you could help: request the book for me.