bibliographing

“‘We have a lot of time to read when we are unmarried. Not as much as the merchant marine maybe. But plenty.’”
—Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees, spoken by the Colonel

Happy Sunday, everyone. It is an absolutely beautiful day here, my ideal weather: sunny, breezy, and around 60 degrees. I’m sure many of you are fans of the summer but I am an autumn girl through and through, and even though it’s not yet September we have gotten some lovely fall-type weather here lately, which [...]

I wasn’t expecting to read quite such an extensive critique of Google Books metadata at Language Log, but on reflection of course it does make sense. Geoff Nunberg writes:
This is almost certainly the Last Library, after all. There’s no Moore’s Law for capture, and nobody is ever going to scan most of these books again. [...]

Hello all, it’s been ten days, and I’m not 100% ready to be back. We’ll have to see if I kick things off again this week or next. No promises. I spent last weekend holed up with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and today holed up with some Wodehouse (The Mating Season, a good [...]

I was hoping not to have to take a break from blogging this summer, but it’s looking pretty unavoidable for the next ten days or so. Fingers crossed, I’ll be back in normal mode the last week in August, with some good material built up (The History of Emily Montague, for one. Also, last night [...]

I wasn’t going to read the letters of Abelard and Heloïse originally, because I was going to stick to fictional letters. But then I came across Forbidden Love: from the letters of Abelard and Heloïse, an installment of the Penguin Great Loves series. I sort of hate reading excerpts from things but I am a [...]

Is it actually a thing to say that the world can be divided into Hemingway people and Fitzgerald people, or is it just something I’ve thought long enough that I think it’s a thing? Anyway, I believe this is at least as valid as the Beatles/Elvis bifurcation (or Beatles/Stones). I’ve always fallen on the Hemingway [...]

So, on to the form—the reason for all this, anyway.
I had, of course, read plenty of epistolary novels before starting this project, but I think I’d always taken for granted something that’s actually a little weird when you think about it. Not always, but often, the letters (and other documents) that make up the story [...]

One of Mr. B’s plots against Pamela is to have sham marriage. One of her former fellow-servants sneaks Pamela a note to the effect that Mr. B is going to propose, and they are going to have a wedding ceremony, but that Mr. B has already engaged a disreputable lawyer to pose as the minister. [...]

Why do I hate Pamela so much? It’s because she has such a one-track mind. Virtue only means one thing: keeping your legs closed until you’re married. That might sound crude, but it doesn’t sound any less crude drawn out over 500 pages of romantic fluff, really. And virtue is Pamela’s only value.
But the value [...]