I am going to teach at Swarthmore College this academic year, and my wife and I are preparing to move. That means, among other things, I'm deciding what books to take with me.

It's not quite the same as deciding what to take if we were moving to a desert island, but it poses an interesting problem. I'll be teaching in the education program and want to have personal resources available.

My curriculum will be shaped by the nature and needs of my students, so it will be comforting to have these five old friends available as I teach in a new place with new educational challenges.

First of all there is a dictionary. I collect dictionaries and love to skim them for new words and ideas. My favorite, because of the clarity of its definitions and the rich etymological information it provides, is the Longman Dictionary of the English Language. I have the 1984 edition but there are newer editions, which I would recommend to others. But it's the older one for me as it's full of my notes and marked up with teaching ideas.

The second book is the Encyclopedia of the American Left. It contains entries ranging from The American Workers Party, Harry Bridges, and El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Espanola to Workers Schools, Yiddish Left, and Die Zukunft. It provides an introduction to organizations, ideas, and people who have played roles on the American left. When I first got the book as a gift I sat down to peruse it and by the end of a month I'd read all the entries. I find it invaluable for research, lesson planning, and simply to fill in the gaps in the history of the left that we all probably have.