Waste Paper

John Warburton (1682–1759) collected drama manuscripts during a fruitful period in English literature. Unfortunately, he’s remembered chiefly for his carelessness — he left a pile of 50 manuscripts in his kitchen and returned months later to find that his cook had destroyed nearly all of them in lighting fires and lining pie pans.

Among the losses were plays by Massinger, Ford, Dekker, Greene, Davenant, Tourneur, Rowley, Chapman, Glapthorne, and Middleton — and three by William Shakespeare.

See A Poor Review and A Loss for Words.

February 14, 2011February 10, 2011 | Literature

Literary Stature

Comparative popularity of British novelists at the end of the 19th century, from Strand, August 1906. The giant is Dickens, followed by Thackeray and the now largely forgotten Hall Caine. Lesser mortals, left to right, are Thomas Hardy, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Marie Corelli, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Augusta Ward, J.M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Stanley Weyman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Charles Kingsley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Israel Zangwill, Charles Reade, and E.F. Benson.

“It should be pointed out that this diagram does not pretend to apportion the degree of contemporary literary reputations. It only shows what kind of fiction has been most read by the masses during the past twenty years.”

February 13, 2011February 9, 2011 | Literature

By the Numbers

In 1922, T.E. Lawrence joined the Royal Air Force under the alias John Hume Ross, AC2 No. 352087. Exposed by the Daily Express, he joined the Tank Corps as Private Thomas Edward Shaw, No. 7875698. Eventually he returned to the RAF as Aircraftsman T.E. Shaw, No. 338171. His account of life in the air force was published under the byline “352087 A/C Ross.”

Noël Coward once began a letter to him, “Dear 338171 (May I call you 338?)”

February 9, 2011February 6, 2011 | Literature

Writers’ Fancies

“If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman; but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation.” — Samuel Johnson

“I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the RCA Building, would pall a little as the days ran on.” — James Thurber

Isaac Asimov, a claustrophile, used to envy the keepers of New York subway newsstands, “for I imagined they could board it up whenever they wanted to, put the light on, lie on a cot at the bottom, and read magazines. I used to fantasize doing so, with the warm rumble of the subway trains intermittently passing.”

February 6, 2011February 3, 2011 | Literature

Misc

ALONE and UPRAISE can be beheaded twice and retain their essential meanings.
Evelyn Waugh’s first wife was named Evelyn.
1033 = 8¹ + 8⁰ + 8³ + 8³
Can a shadow rotate?
“Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience.” — Benjamin Franklin

January 31, 2011January 29, 2011 | Language · Literature · Quotations · Science & Math

Book Perils

“I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book, and ransack every page.” — Emerson

“When we read, we are, we must be, repeating the words to ourselves unconsciously; for how else should we discover, as we have all discovered in our time, that we have been mispronouncing a word which, in fact, we have never spoken? I refer to such words as ‘misled,’ which I, and millions of others when young, supposed to be ‘mizzled.'” — A.A. Milne

“It is one of the oddest things in the world that you can read a page or more and think of something utterly different.” — Christian Morgenstern

January 28, 2011January 26, 2011 | Literature

A Pretty Problem

In Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh, Mr. Churchill reads a word problem to his wife:

“In a lake the bud of a water-lily was observed, one span above the water, and when moved by the gentle breeze, it sunk in the water at two cubits’ distance. Required the depth of the water.”

“That is charming, but must be very difficult,” she says. “I could not answer it.”

Is it? If a span is 9 inches and a cubit is 18 inches, how deep is the water?

	Select Click for Answer
At the water’s surface, the bud marks one vertex of a right triangle. If the depth of the water is x inches, then (x + 9)² = x² + 36². If my algebra is good, then x = 67.5 inches. Mr. Churchill was quoting the 12th-century Sanskrit text Lilavati, in which the problem first appeared, to show his wife that mathematics can be poetic: In a certain lake swarming with geese and cranes, The tip of a bud of lotus was seen one span above the water. Forced by the wind, it gradually moved, and was submerged at a distance of two cubits. O mathematician, tell quickly the depth of the water. “There is something divine in the science of numbers,” Churchill tells her. “Like God, it holds the sea in the hollow of its hand. It measures the earth; it weighs the stars; it illumines the universe; it is law, it is order, it is beauty. And yet we imagine–that is, most of us–that its highest end and culminating point is book-keeping by double entry. It is our way of teaching it that makes it so prosaic.” (Thanks, Shreevatsa.)

Click for Answer

January 28, 2011January 27, 2013 | Literature · Puzzles · Science & Math

Found Out

In spite of twenty-five years in Southern California, [Aldous Huxley] remains an English gentleman. The scientist’s habit of examining everything from every side and of turning everything upside down and inside out is also characteristic of Aldous. I remember him leafing through a copy of Transition, reading a poem in it, looking again at the title of the magazine, reflecting for a moment, then saying, ‘Backwards it spells NO IT ISN(T) ART.’

— Igor Stravinsky, Dialogues, 1982

January 27, 2011January 26, 2011 | Language · Literature

“Precocity in Pigtails”

This is James Norman Hall. He co-wrote Mutiny on the Bounty, operated a machine gun for the Royal Fusiliers, flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, and spent months as a German POW.

And he wrote the poetry of a 9-year-old girl.

Literally. In 1938 a girl came to Hall in a troubled dream and began dictating poems to him about life in his childhood home of Colfax, Iowa. “She told me things about people in our hometown that I had completely forgotten, or thought I had.”

He typed them up and published them under the title Oh, Millersville!, claiming they were the rediscovered work of a turn-of-the-century Iowa farmgirl named Fern Gravel:

Oh, it is wonderful in Millersville
On many a winter night,
When the ground is covered with snow
And the moon is shining so bright.
You can hear the sleigh-bells jingling
Everywhere around.
I don’t think there could be
A more beautiful sound.

Keats it ain’t, but its homely charm brought writeups in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Hall let six years elapse before he published a confession in the Atlantic Monthly, explaining that he’d been ruminating on the evils of industrialization when the girl’s voice had entered his thoughts. The voice, it seemed, remained: Hall wrote a dozen more books and moved to Tahiti, but in his autobiography he wrote that “Iowa, for all the years I have been away from it, has always been, and still is, home for me.”

January 25, 2011January 28, 2017 | Hoaxes · Literature

Don’t Call Us

When Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in 1930, he began to receive fan mail. One young woman proposed becoming his secretary. “I’ll do everything for you,” she wrote. “And when I say everything, I mean everything.”

Lewis’ wife, Dorothy, saw the letter and responded. “My dear Miss,” she wrote. “My husband already has a stenographer who handles his work for him. And, as for ‘everything,’ I take care of that myself — and when I say everything, I mean everything.”

January 22, 2011January 21, 2011 | Literature