Why did ModernLib start to begin with?

When he started his collection in 1993, the Webmaster had lots of questions about “old books” in general and about the Modern Library in particular. Back then there were few resources of any kind about Modern Library titles. Only two books existed about the Modern Library series at the time, George Andes' 1989 Descriptive Bibliography of The Modern Library (a really great attempt but filled with errors and omissions), and Henry Toledano's Modern Library Price Guide (a review of the updated version lives here). To this day there are few printed references. (Click here for a list.) There were few Modern Library specialist dealers; the Webmaster knew only one—the redoubtable Henry Toledano. And even though he was the best, Toledano was just one source. Collaboration Web sites such as ABE or even decent search engines didn't exist yet. eBay wasn't even a concept.

After two or three years of feeling pretty alone, the Webmaster determined that if he were to learn more about his hobby it would make sense to use the emerging Internet to do it. Having been a technical writer for around 15 years by that time, he had pretty good faith in what this Web thing might become. He determined the best thing to do would be to make the information come to him by creating a place that might draw other folks of like interest who'd be willing to share information. And so he started ModernLib (originally called Dogeared) on a hunch.

Looks like he was right.

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