The book to celebrate Haskell Curry’s 80th birthday is free to borrow on the Internet Archive:

To H.B. Curry: Essays on Combinatory Logic, Lambda Calculus and Formalism

https://archive.org/details/tohbcurryessayso00edit

It contains Howard’s original essay on the Curry—Howard isomorphism (page 479), Dana Scott’s categorical interpretation of the type-free lambda calculus (page 403), and much more. Check it out!

This book has been online for a few years now, since October 2021.

Recently, at PLDI’26 in Boulder, I realized it might be nice to tell the story of how it got there:

• In 2018 or so, Mitch Wand moved out of his office and into a corner of the PhD student lab at Northeastern. I learned that Mitch was moving when stacks of books and papers appeared in the hallway between the lab and his old office. There was a LOT of paper. The old, red book of essays to H.B. Curry was in one of the piles - to be thrown away if not collected. I took it home, and I was so surprised/disturbed after finding it that I eventually looked through all the files for more things to save.
  • You can see Mitch’s signature on page 1 of the Internet Archive upload. Top right corner.
• In March 2021, I sent email to Internet Archive asking about pricing to scan and upload the book. The price was too high for me: $3 setup fee plus 12 cents per page.
  • Why did I ask? I don’t remember. Maybe I wanted to cite Howard’s essay and couldn’t find it online.
• In September 2021, I made a GoFundMe and a YouTube video about digitizing the book.
  • Between March and September I must’ve been doing research as a postdoc or parenting baby Ellis (born May 2021) or drinking too much because it was COVID.
• Breandan Considine pledged the full amount ($75?) to digitize the book. HOORAY!
• A bad thing happened. Tim Bigelow at the archive realized that the book was under copyright for the next 60 years or so. That meant the only way to get the book online would be to donate it to the Internet Archive. The good news: donating is free.
• On September 17, 2021, I donated the book at Boston Public Library. It went online the next month.

The next summer, I moved out of Boston. I regret not reading the book cover to cover before donating (to this day, I still haven’t read it all) but it was the right thing to do and I’m grateful to Breandan for providing the motivation to hand it over!