Dorothy Parker once attended a Halloween party where she noticed a group of people around a tub of water. She asked what they were doing and was told they were ducking for apples.
“There, but for a typographical error,” she said, “is the story of my life.”
At the height of Mark Twain’s popularity, a group of his friends in New York wanted to send him a birthday greeting.
But Twain was traveling abroad and none of them knew where to direct the letter.
After some hopeless havering they simply addressed it “Mark Twain, God Knows Where.”
Several weeks later a note arrived from Twain.
It said: “He did.”
In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift describes two fictional moons of Mars:
They [the Laputan astronomers] have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or ‘satellites,’ which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation, that influences the other heavenly bodies …
That was in 1726. A century and a half later, two Martian moons were discovered. Phobos and Deimos were in fact about 1.4 and 3.5 diameters from Mars’ center, and they revolved in 7.7 and 30.3 hours, respectively. Voltaire had made a similarly prescient guess in his romance Micromegas of 1752.
Fittingly, two craters on Deimos have been named Swift and Voltaire.
A razor company once invited George Bernard Shaw to shave his famous beard. He responded with a postcard:
Gentlemen:
I shall never shave, for the same reason that I started a beard, and for the reason my father started his. I remember standing at his side, when I was five, while he was shaving for the last time. “Father,” I asked, “Why do you shave?” He stood there for a full minute and finally looked down at me. “Why the hell do I?” he said.
— GBS
Mark Twain once received this telegram from a publisher:
NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS.
He responded:
NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES.
“There is no worse robber than a bad book.” — Italian saying
The knight’s tour is a recreation familiar to chessplayers: Move a knight about an empty chessboard so as to visit each square exactly once.
On this board, each square contains a syllable. Collect them in the right order and you’ll compose a six-line quotation from Shakespeare. What is it?
(Hint: Start on e4, “to”.)
“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges
“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — Somerset Maugham
When he died in 1973, Chicago janitor Henry Darger left his own monument: a 10-volume novel entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.
Discovered by his landlords, the fantasy manuscript, illustrated with hundreds of drawings and watercolor paintings, totaled 15,145 single-spaced typed pages. It may be the longest novel ever written.