I first heard this joke from Rudolf Peierls in 1961. Since then the size of Physical Review has doubled, doubled again, and is on the verge of completing its third doubling. Physical Review Letters is nearly as big as Physical Review was in 1961. The journals of other physical societies have undergone comparable expansions, as have the numbers and sizes of the commercially published physics journals.

I was recently asked to address a group of Cornell alumni and librarians on how the library is used by a typical physical scientist. I did point out that they had selected a distinctly oddball specimen, but they persisted. So to give them a sense of the calamitous conditions we have created, I went systematically through the current periodicals section of the Cornell Physical Sciences Library to count how many journals I felt I ought to look at but didn't. My criterion was stringent: a journal made my list only if it would be downright embarrassing to admit that I never looked. I had to be able to imagine a colleague responding to my confession with amazement: “You never look at X?!” Counting only once those with multiple versions (A, B, C,…) I still found 32. In one case, uncertain whether an admission that I never looked would occasion a blush or merely a nervous giggle, I randomly opened a random issue and found an article I had not seen before, expanding interestingly upon earlier work of my own. That information had not been conveyed.

It is in this context that we must view the resistance of many scientists to current efforts by library administrators to make draconian cuts in their subscription lists. Keeping up with everything is driving the libraries into bankruptcy. Early signs of this problem and how physicists might respond surfaced over ten years ago. My colleague Ken Wilson and I, physics department representatives on the library committee and therefore conscious of the looming catastrophe, responded to announcements of two new physics journals by writing a letter to Physics Today announcing that our library could not afford any more subscriptions.