Tuesday, April 15, 1997
Folly Within the
Academy
by
[email protected]
Let me begin by confessing: I have borrowed almost every book I've read on investing. When I get to the line -- there is always this line -- that says, "this book is the best first investment you could have made," I feel a mixture of astonishment at the even greater returns that I'll get and the bittersweet sense of nonconformity that comes from not doing what one is expected to do. A few books have prompted me to open my wallet and pass on its contents to a sales clerk, so that I could feel fully the pride of ownership. If I didn't own The Motley Fool Investment Guide, I would feel much worse about putting it under my pillow at night and lending it out to others. Ann Arbor is a progressive town, but its library does have rules.
Borrowing books is usually more convenient than buying them. The Ann Arbor public library has quite a good assortment of up-to-date books on all things financial. Type in an author's name and go straight to the book. There is no wondering about whether Buffett is on the "Biography" or "Big Business" or "Investing" shelves that occupy so much of the floor space at Borders. And the library, when used properly, tends to be much cheaper.
This leads to my second confession: I have not yet read Peter Lynch, investor extraordinaire and author of Beating the Street and One Up on Wall Street. This is an obvious gap in my education, since everyone else seems to have read him, or at least they have read enough to frequently begin sentences with the phrase, "According to Peter Lynch." Not wanting to end up reading his collected works by quotation, I march to the pubic library and type in, "A=Lynch P" and happily see eight or nine copies of his three books scroll by. Unhappily, I learn that I am not the only citizen of Ann Arbor to discover the great cost advantage of the library and find that every single copy of every single one of his books is checked out.
So I now come to a close with my last confession: I am a graduate student, studying history. When the Gardners point out that everyone has good investment insights from his or her own field, I smile a wan smile, knowing that universities are not listed on any of the major exchanges. Unfortunately, my continued quest for a Peter Lynch book shows that this chasm between the world that has ideas about money and the world that has ideas about everything but money is unlikely to close anytime soon.
After being thwarted by the great demand for Lynch at the public library, I move onto the University of Michigan's colossal collection. With six or seven million volumes, it didn't occur to me that it would lack a couple of the books that seem to fall into the category of minor classics and at the very least have great interest to students of the "culture" of investing. But if UM students do have interest in Lynch's work, either practical or esoteric, they too have to wait in line at the public library. For while there were two other Peter Lynches, the Peter Lynch was nowhere to be found. (Titles by the other Peter Lynches include: Patriarchy and Narrative: The Borgheni Chamber Decorations and Genital Dermatology. Really.)
It turns out that the business school has one copy of One Up on Wall Street, and that copy is not checked out, but the overall point remains. Folly is even harder to find within the halls of the academy than it is on Wall Street or Main Street.
Tim Randolph
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