I decided to put my old textbooks on amazon today. One sold less than an hour later, McQuarrie’s Physical Chemistry. I bought this book fall 2000 for the first physical chemistry class at UC Irvine – it was my first textbook in quantum mechanics. I remember scribing partition functions from the book into MathCAD to calculate the heat capacity of carbon monoxide, learning linear algebra from the math chapters, pondering for hours about the variational principle, gaining an aversion to perturbation theory, all based on material from this one book. I’ve had the book for eight years, and during the last five it’s sat on my shelf largely ignored. Now it’s gone.