BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THE JOYS OF READING

Hatchards is a branch of Waterstones, and claims to be 
the oldest bookshop in the United Kingdom, founded on 
Piccadilly in 1797 by John Hatchard. After one move, 
it has been at the same location on Piccadilly next 
to Fortnum and Mason since 1801...
(Wikipedia)

On the other hand , THE KING'S ARMS, founded by
stationer John Brindley in 1728 had the distinction
of being London's oldest bookshop. In 1928, a book
titled THE OLDEST LONDON BOOKSHOP , 1728-
!928, A History of 200 years by George Smith and
Frank Benger (London: Ellis, 1928). The store was
located at 29 New Bond Street.
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“Poetry is not the most important thing in life…I’d
much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie 
and sucking sweets,”

     Dylan Thomas
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"My mother used to read Mark Twain to us. She scared
us half to death with those kids going down into that
cave."
       Bill Cosby, quoted in LIFE (March 15, 1968)
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"I read "A Tale of Two Cities" in the last year of
middle school and found it hard going at times, but 
when I got to the sacrifice at the end, I wept like 
a baby.

Jeff Vanderbilt. "By the Book" in The New York
Times Book Review (Sunday, April 17, 2021)
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H.L. MENCKEN AT AGE 9 READS HUCKLEBERRY FINN

"If I undertook to tell you the effect it had
upon me my talk would sound frantic, and even
delirious. Its impact was genuinely terrific.
I had not gone further than the first 
incomparable chapter before I realized, child
though I was, that I had entered a domain of
new and gorgeous wonders, and thereafter I
pressed on steadily to the last word. My
gait, of course, was still slow, but it 
became steadily faster as I proceeded.As
the blurbs on the slip-covers of murder 
mysteries say, I simply couldn't put the
book down."

H.L. Mencken. "Larval Stage of a Bookworm"
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         MY POETICAL INDEBTEDNESS TO A.E. HOUSMAN

                    A.E.
                   I.O.U.
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          THE ALL-TIME BEST EPIGRAPH TO A PUBLISHED BOOK

        What the heck is a finial and why do we need one?

 Epigraph to Dilbert: A Treasury of Sunday Strips 
  (Kansas City; Andrews McMeel Publishing.
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SELF REFERENTIAL MOMENTS IN FICTION

In  Number 3 of  The Hardy Boys Series  — THE SECRET OF THE OLD MILL –
as the story gets underway, there is a plug for the previous two adventures:L

       However, the Hardy boys had inherited much of their father’s ability and deductive talent. Already they had aided in solving two mysteries that had kept Bayport by the ears. As related, in “The Hardy Boys: The Tower Treasure,” they had solved the mystery of the theft of valuable jewels and bonds from Tower Mansion… In the second volume of the series, “The Hardy Boys: The House on the Cliff,” has been told how the Hardy Boys discovered the haunt of a gang of smugglers…

Now, if that isn’t an example of post-modernism in literature,  I do not know what is.  It is also smart marketing. Any reader starting the series at any point beyond the first volume would soon be hustled back to buy the books he missed.  I have to admit that age 11, I had no idea what bonds were, but at least I knew they were valuable.

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GOING BEYOND THE BOUNDS OF FICTION IN MICHAEL CONNELLY’S  THE CROSSING

If   the creators of THE HARDY BOYS SERIES were clever and postmodern in promoting books in their series, Michael Connelly goes them one better in crisscrossingThe boundaries of fiction and reality. In Chapter 12 of Connelly’s Hieronymus Bosch novel The Crossing, Connelly’s other famous character The Lincoln Lawyer (Mickey Haller)  steps outside the novel to become a living person who has had a film made about him:

   ‘Haller missed the entire session with Foster. He waseither a celebrity lawyer or a notorious lawyer, depending on how you looked at it. He had received the ultimate imprimatur of L.A.  acceptance – a movie about one of his cases starring no less than Matthew McConaughey.”

   The more I think about the above paragraph, the more confused I get about the blurred boundaries of fact (the movie) and fiction (the character who has a movie made about his adventures). Obviously a ton of fictional characters have been brought to life on the screen, but the movies never became part of those characters’ identity/biography in the books they appeared. On the other hand, in Part 2 of Don Quixote, the great knight and Sancho Panza, his faithful squire, enter new adventures fully aware that they have become celebrities of sort and that their activities were fully recorded in Part One. Indeed, it can be said that Post-Modernism in novel writing was invented by Cervantes.

THE AUTHOR OF STIFF GOES TO THE MEDICAL SCHOOL LIBRARY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA , SAN FRANCISCO TO DO RESEARCH FOR HER BOOK ABOUT CADAVERS

A young man was looking at the computer record of the books under my name: The Principles and Practice of Embalming, The Chemistry of Death, Gunshot Injuries. He looked at the book I now wished to check out: Proceedings of the Ninth Stapp Car Crash Conference. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. It was all there in his glance. Often when I checked out a book I expected to be questioned. Why do you want this book? What are you up to? What kind of person are you?

Mary Roach. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003).

"By my mid-30s, I was a mother. One day, I was on
 the subway and, of course, reading. As I finished
 V.S. Naipaul's 'A House for Mr. Biswas," I burst
 into tears. Oh, how I wanted Mr. Biswas, the
 humiliated sign-writer turned journalist to get
 his heart's desire."
  
  Min Jee Lee. "Shelf Lives" in The New York Times
  Book Review (Sunday, April 18, 2021)
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