Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to the Aldrich Library of FT-IR Spectra.

They’re big and heavy, and they cost over £500 each. Yes, each. There are three of these mighty tomes, between them containing over 5000 pages worth of infrared spectra. Almost every organic compound worth talking about has a spectrum in these slab-like knowledge banks. I say almost. Interestingly, I couldn’t find an entry for one of the things I was looking for. I suspect it’s rather obscure. Either that or it has another name I should look for.

There aren’t many books that you could actually bludgeon someone with, but one of these would do the job quite nicely. It also makes you feel a bit like a wizard, leafing through a book that size.

Carrying all three of them to the photocopier was… interesting.