In Don Quixote, when Sancho Panza’s ass is stolen, Quixote sympathizes and the two ride on … Sancho somehow “sitting side-ways on his ass.” In the next chapter he laments its loss again: “It may be well to saddle Rocinante again, that he may supply the loss of my Dapple.”

Sancho also leaves his wallet at an inn and loses his cloak and the food it contains. Yet later he discovers the food on the ass … and puts gold in his wallet.

Strangely, these errors appear in the novel’s second edition but not the first. No one knows how this happened; possibly it’s a compositor’s error, or perhaps Cervantes added a page without weaving it into the narrative.

See Cast Away.

Despite his literary brilliance, Henry James was absurdly prolix in his daily life. Reportedly he once asked a waiter to “bring me … fetch me … carry me … supply me … in other words (I hope you are following me) serve–when it is cooked … scorched … grilled I should say–a large … considerable … meaty (as opposed to fatty) … chop.”

Once while motoring through England with Edith Wharton, James lost his way and hailed an old man at the side of the road. “My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer–so. My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.”

The old man looked blank. “In short, my good man,” said James, “what I want to put to you in a word is this: Supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right), where are we now in relation to–”

“Oh, please,” said Wharton, “do ask him where the King’s Road is.”

“Ah–? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?”

“Ye’re in it,” said the man.

Physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) is not widely remembered outside Germany — which is a great pity, as his notebooks contain some of history’s most trenchant aphorisms:

• “If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.”
• “What they call ‘heart’ lies much lower than the fourth waistcoat button.”
• “What a pity it isn’t a sin to drink water, cried an Italian, how good it would taste.”
• “A book is a mirror: If an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.”
• “The often unreflected respect for old laws, old customs, and old religion we have to thank for all mischief in the world.”
• “It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: If we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.”
• “Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.”
• “If walking on two legs is not natural to man it is certainly an invention that does him credit.”
• “It is almost impossible to carry the torch of wisdom through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard.”
• “Now that education is so easy, men are drilled for greatness, just as dogs are trained to retrieve. In this way we’ve discovered a new sort of genius, those great at being drilled. These are the people who are mainly spoiling the market.”
• “Can it be that the evil in the world is in general of more use than the good?”

The “waste books” were admired by Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud, and even Tolstoy wondered “why the Germans of the present day neglect this writer so much.” He never got an answer.

George Moore was writing in his study when his aunt entered.

“I have sad news for you, Mr. Moore,” she said. “I regret to inform you that your friend Martin Ross is dead.”

Moore lowered his pen, sighed, and gazed quietly around him at the trappings of his long literary life. “How sad,” he said, “how sad. Here I am in the midst of this, alive … and my friend, my dear friend, Edmund Gosse, dead.”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Moore,” the lady put in gently. “It is Martin Ross who is dead, not Edmund Gosse.”

Moore said, “Surely you don’t expect me to go through all that again?”

Thomas Macaulay was a child prodigy — and, one imagines, a trial to his parents:

• On seeing a chimney as a toddler, he asked his father, “Is that hell?”
• At 3 his mother told him he must learn to study without his bread and butter. He said, “Yes, mama, industry shall be my bread and attention my butter.”
• When he was 4 years old a servant spilled hot coffee on his legs; when the hostess inquired how he was feeling, he said, “Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.”
• When a housemaid threw away some oyster shells he’d been using to fence a garden plot, he marched into the drawing room and said, “Cursed be Sally, for it is written, ‘Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor’s landmark.'”

Reputedly his great gifts stayed with him throughout his life: As an old man he recited two poems he hadn’t seen since age 13.