I first heard this joke from Rudolph 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.