The world may indeed be getting bigger but the books are getting smaller, with writers devoting years to researching the history of salt, the taming of the screw, the state of suburbia as told to the houseplant, what the lowly minivan has to tell us about globalization, etc. This leaves us hankering for the ancient days, when one learned man could tee off on the whole gamut of human thought in a single volume. But the big world, it would seem, has killed off the big book.

Or has it? Here are links to three 20th century scholars who brazenly refused to see their theories sold in miniature form. First we’ve got Chris Alexander, who got started finding the math in rug designs, then instructed young hippie couples in homebuilding, and just now finally published his four-volume magnum opus which begins with hard math and science and works its way up through architecture and ethics to metaphysics and cosmology. Then there’s Ivan Illich, who, thirty years before Wi-Fi precociously hated on all things fast. And finally there’s Bucky Fuller, a scientist who wasn’t afraid to write in plain English and work way, way outside his specialty.

To government-issue nerds like Milton Friedman and Stephen Hawking, this adventurous trio of foxes must seem like the dilettantes in the back of the coffee shop, manically scribbling in their notebooks and ranting at the sort of curious and uniformed people who will listen to such blather. People like us.

Christopher Alexander Ivan Illich Buckminster Fuller