In 1950, Stanford graduate student Robert E. Young realized that two chapters of Henry James’ novel The Ambassadors had been reversed in every American edition since 1903.

“Various discrepancies in facts and time are apparent on careful reading of the chapters in their present order,” he wrote. “On the other hand, the reversal of the two results in the complete elimination of these discrepancies.”

It turned out that the two chapters appeared in the opposite order in the English editions, and many American publishers adopted that order accordingly.

But James himself had not noted any error in revising the American text in 1909, and it’s possible to view that version as correct and the English text as reversed, if one allows for some chronological inconsistency.

The result is that there is no definitive text. “The mishap is particularly ironic,” Young wrote, “in view of the fact that James regarded The Ambassadors as his most perfectly constructed novel, his masterpiece.”

Many of the characters in Lewis Carroll’s stories were suggested by the illustrated tiles that decorated the fireplace in his study at Christ Church, Oxford:

• At top is the ship that the Bellman steered, though “the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes.”
• At top left is the Lory, who joined in the Caucus-Race in Alice in Wonderland.
• Below the Lory is the Dodo, who claimed a thimble as his prize.
• At bottom left is the Fawn that couldn’t remember its name in Through the Looking-Glass.
• At top right is the Eaglet, another Caucus-Race participant.
• Below the Eaglet is the Gryphon, also from Wonderland.
• At bottom right is the Beaver from “The Hunting of the Snark,” the only creature that the Butcher knew how to kill.

One of Carroll’s child-friends, Enid Stevens, supplied these particulars for The Lewis Carroll Picture Book, published in 1899. “As I sat on Mr. Dodgson’s knee before the fire,” she wrote, “he used to make the creatures have long and very amusing conversations between themselves. The little creatures on the intervening tiles used to ‘squirm’ in at intervals. I think they suggested the ‘Little birds are feeding,’ &c., in ‘Sylvie and Bruno.'”

The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift were all the product of one man, Edward Stratemeyer, a New Jersey author who wrote more than 1,300 books and eventually founded a syndicate of ghostwriters who pounded out juvenile mysteries based on his instructions.

Stratemeyer conceived the syndicate when his Rover Boys series proved so popular that he could not keep up with the demand for more books. He corralled a stable of hungry young writers, and in 1910 they were producing 10 new series annually. Each writer earned $50 to $250 for a manuscript he could produce in a month, working with characters and plot devised by Stratemeyer. Stratemeyer would review each completed manuscript for consistency and publish it under a pseudonym that he owned — Franklin W. Dixon, Carolyn Keene, Laura Lee Hope, Victor Appleton. Each book in a series mentioned the thrilling earlier volumes and foreshadowed the next book. The formula worked so well that when Stratemeyer died in 1930 his daughter continued the business; when she died in 1982 the syndicate was selling more than 2 million books a year.

This sounds cynical, but it worked because Stratemeyer had a sympathetic understanding of what young readers wanted. “The trouble is that very few adults get next to the heart of a boy when choosing something for him to read,” Stratemeyer wrote to a publisher in 1901. “A wide awake lad has no patience with that which is namby-pamby, or with that which he puts down as a ‘study book’ in disguise. He demands real flesh and blood heroes who do something.”

Woman: What terrible weather we’re having.

Oscar Wilde: Yes, but if it wasn’t for the snow, how could we believe in the immortality of the soul?

Woman: What an interesting question, Mr. Wilde! But tell me exactly what you mean.

Oscar Wilde: I haven’t the slightest idea.

(Quoted in Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Wit, 1946)

Confined to an asylum in 1849, poet John Clare made this curious entry in a notebook:

M Drst Mr Cllngwd

M nrl wrn t & wnt t hr frm Nbd wll wn M r hv m t n prc & wht hv dn D knw wht r n m Dbt — kss’s fr tn yrs & lngr stll & Ingr thn tht whn ppl mk sch mstks s t cll m Gds bstrd & whrs p m b shttng m p frm Gds ppl t f th w f cmmn snse & thn tk m hd ff bcs th cnt fnd m t t hrds hrd

Drst Mr r fthfll r d thnk f m knw wht w sd tgthr — dd vst m n hll sm tm bck bt dnt cm hr gn fr t s ntrs bd plc wrs nd wrs nd w r ll Frnchmn flsh ppl tll m hv gt n hm n ths wrld nd s dnt believe n th thr nrt t mk mslf hvn wth m drst Mr nd sbscrb mslf rs fr vr & vr

Jhn Clr

Decoding it is simple enough — Clare had removed all vowels and the letter Y. Evidently it was the draft of a letter:

My Dearest Mary Collingwood

I am nearly worn out and want to hear from you — Nobody will own me or have me at any price and what have I done — Do you know what you are in my Debt — kisses for ten years and longer still and longer than that — when people make such mistakes as to call me God’s bastard and whores pay me by shutting me up from God’s people out of the way of common sense and then take my head off because they can’t find me — it out-Herods Herod.

Dearest Mary are you faithful or do you think of me — you know what we said together — you did visit me in hell sometime back but don’t come here again for it is a notorious bad place worse and worse and we are all turned Frenchmen — foolish people tell me I have got no home in this world and as I don’t believe in the other [? undertake] to make myself heaven with my dearest Mary and subscribe myself yours for ever and ever

John Clare

I almost offered this as a puzzle, but it’s too sad. “This is among the most disturbing letters that Clare ever wrote,” notes biographer Jonathan Bate. “It takes us inside his head during a phase of derangement. Even once one has broken the code, it is impossible to decipher the sub-text, especially as we know nothing about the identity of Mary Collingwood beyond the fact that in another of his lists Clare identified her as a Northampton girl.”

Lewis Carroll’s father was rector at St. Peter’s Church in Croft-on-Tees. On a tour of the church in 1992, Joel Birenbaum noticed a stone carving of a cat’s head on the chancel’s east wall, a few feet above the floor. When he dropped to his knees and looked at it from a child’s perspective, the cat’s mouth assumed a broad grin.

His discovery appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune on July 13, 1992.

• In “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Keats writes of Cortez discovering the Pacific Ocean. Balboa did.
• In Ivanhoe, Malvoisin’s first name changes from Philip to Richard.
• In War and Peace, Vera is 17 in 1805 and 24 in 1809.
• In Eugene O’Neill’s Where the Cross Is Made, the stage directions call for a one-armed man to sit at a table “resting his elbows, his chin in his hands.”
• In the Aeneid, Chorinaeus and Numa die and then reappear with no explanation.

In Little Dorrit, Chapter 33, Tattycoram appears with “an iron box some two feet square” in her arms. Writes Ebenezer Brewer in his Reader’s Handbook of Famous Names in Fiction, “She must have been a pretty strong girl, with very long arms.”

Excerpts from Somerset Maugham’s notebook:

• “No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention.”
• “People are never so ready to believe you as when you say things in dispraise of yourself; and you are never so much annoyed as when they take you at your word.”
• “An action is not virtuous merely because it is unpleasant to do.”
• “The more intelligent a man is the more capable is he of suffering.”
• “However harmless a thing is, if the law forbids it most people will think it wrong.”
• “I don’t know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.”
• “All this effort of natural selection, wherefore? What is the good of all this social activity beyond helping unessential creatures to feed and propagate?”
• “I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.”