The literary life, back then
Every once in a while, I come across something that makes it clear how
much times have changed. Most recently, a footnote in P. N.
Furbank's review of Victoria Glendinning's biography of Leonard Woolf (
New York Review of Books, 12/21/06,
p. 44). Glendinning quotes a letter to Lytton Strachey, from
Woolf's first year in the Ceylon civil service, in which he describes a
fantasy life that includes "reading Voltaire on the immense
verandah". Here comes the footnote:
He had brought with him to Ceylon a
seventy-volume edition of the works of Voltaire.
Unimaginable today, I think, even for book nuts like me.
[Mark Liberman points out that these days you could bring it in your pocket, on a thumb drive. But he understands that I was talking about traveling with those old-fashioned objects made from wood pulp -- book books, rather than e-books.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 9, 2006 01:41 PM