Stephen Jay Gould taught biology and paleontology at Harvard for decades before his death six years ago, but he bequeathed to Stanford University his collection of notebooks, scarce first editions, and other items that served as source material for the hundreds of articles and books he wrote, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Stanford has promised to use the documents to study the evolution of Gould’s ideas and to document the origins of his inspiration. The university intends to create a multimedia presentation of its analysis.
The discount reportedly grew out of contacts that Gould’s wife, a sculptor named Rhonda Roland Shearer, had with the Stanford Library. While visiting Stanford in 2001, a year before he died, “he and Shearer proposed to librarians the possible creation of digital ‘hypermedia’ editions of his work,” the article says.
The discount might have appealed especially to Gould, who wrote frequently about the development of ideas in science. In one of his last interviews with the press, Gould discussed with The Chronicle what he hoped to achieve with his career and why he felt the need to keep alive the work of evolutionary theorists who came before him. (In a Q&A with the article, Gould talked about his unusual writing habits.) —Richard Monastersky