Light On Dark Water

I have been enjoying this book occasionally since the late 1970s, but have still not read it in its entirety. I pick it up, read a few bits here and there, then put it down again, sometimes for years. I was looking at it recently and it occurred to me that I should mention it here, as it would make an excellent Christmas gift for anyone who loves English literature.

Arranged in chronological order, the subjects of the stories begin with Caedmon and end with Dylan Thomas. There are a good many very minor figures whom I've never otherwise heard of, but it doesn't matter whether it's Johnson or Thomas Birch, if the story is good. Some are funny, some poignant, like the long account of Shelley's death and cremation, and some just odd and striking. 

There is a newer one, called The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, and it appears at the Oxford University Press web site that the old one is no longer in print. But I see used copies for sale on Amazon. I haven't seen the new one, though I cynically suspect it isn't as good. It does apparently broaden the field to include non-English writers and…Bob Dylan. I don't know whether it includes any of the material from the original or not.

Here's a sample. It appears in the section on Tennyson, but the worlds of science and literature meet in it: Charles Babbage, along with his patron Ada Lovelace, invented a calculating machine, the "difference engine," which would have been the world's first stored-program computer if it had ever been completed, which, because of its cost and complexity, it was not.

Tennyson's 

Every minute dies a man,
Every minute one is born.

drew from Babbage the remark that the world's population was in fact constantly increasing. 'I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: "Every minute dies a man / And one and a sixteenth is born". This figure, he added, was a concession to metre, since the actual ratio was 1:167. Tennyson did eventually blur his assertion to the extent of changing "minute" to "moment."

Ok, one more. If my copy were not a forty-year-old mass-market paperback and could be laid flat for easier copying, and I had nothing more pressing to do, I could sit here all afternoon typing out one after another. About P.G. Wodehouse:

A nice old lady sat next to Wodehouse at dinner one night…raved about his work. She said that her sons had great masses of his books piled on their tables, and never missed reading each new one as it came out. 'And when I tell them,' she concluded, 'that I have actually been sitting at dinner with Edgar Wallace, I don't know what they will say.'