The Cat in the Hat uses 225 different words.
Dr. Seuss’ publisher, Bennett Cerf, wagered $50 that the author couldn’t reduce this total to 50 in his next book.
So Seuss produced a new manuscript using precisely 50 words, and collected the $50.
The book was Green Eggs and Ham.
Two months before the outbreak of World War I, Arthur Conan Doyle published a curious short story in The Strand. “Danger! Being the Log of Captain John Sirius” told of a fleet of enemy submarines attacking England’s food imports, starving the nation and winning a war:
Of course, England will not be caught napping in such a fashion again! Her foolish blindness is partly explained by her delusion that her enemy would not torpedo merchant vessels. Common sense should have told her that her enemy will play the game that suits them best — that they will not inquire what they may do, but they will do it first and talk about it afterwards.
In a commentary published with the story, Adm. Penrose Fitzgerald wrote, “I do not myself think that any civilized nation will torpedo unarmed and defenceless merchant ships.” Adm. Sir Compton Domvile felt “compelled to say that I think it most improbable, and more like one of Jules Verne’s stories than any other author I know.” Adm. William Hannam Henderson agreed: “No nation would permit it, and the officer who did it would be shot.”
But within months the U-boats’ depredations had begun, and by February 1915 Doyle was being accused of suggesting the idea to the Germans. “I need hardly say that it is very painful to me to think that anything I have written should be turned against my own country,” he told a reporter. “The object of the story was to warn the public of a possible danger which I saw overhanging this country and to show it how to avoid that danger.”
“Oh, isn’t it a lovely sunset?” a young woman asked Robert Frost.
He said, “I never discuss business after dinner.”
1916 saw a poetic flowering across the United States — a series of public gardens cultivating the plants mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Bard’s death. The one above is at Vassar, but similar installations appeared at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Rockefeller Park in Cleveland, and Central Park.
New York’s garden filled two acres with violets, wind-flowers, bloodroot, hepatica, rock-dress, English daisies, spring beauties, shooting stars, candytuft, forget-me-nots, and moss pinks, as well as an oak transplanted from Stratford-on-Avon. But its participation is surprising: In 1890 a similarly romantic impulse there had led to much darker results.
Bonus factoid: Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same date but on different days. How? Both died on April 23, 1616, but at the time England was following the Julian calendar and Spain the Gregorian — a source of oddities in itself.
In 1922, Ernest Hemingway’s wife lost a suitcase full of his early manuscripts at the Gare de Lyons as she was traveling to meet him in Geneva. It was never recovered.
In 1919, T.E. Lawrence misplaced his briefcase while changing trains at Reading railway station. It had contained the first eight books of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He, too, had to start again.
In 1835, when Thomas Carlyle had finished writing the first volume in his history of the French Revolution, he loaned the manuscript to John Stuart Mill, seeking his opinion. Mill’s maid mistook it for trash and burned it.
“I remember and can still remember less of it than of anything I ever wrote with such toil,” Carlyle wrote in his journal. After laboriously rewriting the volume, he said he felt like a man who had “nearly killed himself accomplishing zero.”
In 1949, New Statesman challenged its readers to parody the style of any novelist named Green or Greene.
Under a pseudonym, Graham Greene submitted a parody of himself:
The child had an air of taking everything in and giving nothing away. At the Rome airport he was led across the tarmac by his aunt, but he seemed to hear nothing of her advice to himself or of the information she produced for the air hostess. He was too busy with his eyes: the hangars had his attention, every lane on the field except his own — that could wait.
‘My nephew,’ she said, ‘yes, that’s him on the list. Roger Court. You will look after him, won’t you? He’s never been quite on his own before,’ but when she made that statement the child’s eyes moved back plane by plane with what looked like contempt, back to the large breasts and the fat legs and the over-responsible mouth: how could she have known, he might have been thinking, how often I am alone?
He came in second.
Huckleberry Finn was already in press in 1884 when publisher Charles L. Webster received an alarmed letter from an advance salesman: A mischievous engraver had altered the illustration above to give it a rather darker character (NSFW).
It certainly puts a new spin on the caption.
Despite a reward of $500, the prankster was never identified. Webster had to call back all published copies of the novel, cut out the plate, and tip in a new one, delaying publication past the Christmas season. But it’s fortunate they caught it when they did — it could have ruined Mark Twain’s career.
Harold Ross personally edited every issue of the New Yorker between 1925 and 1951. Unfortunately, he was a fiend for commas, peppering every sentence until all possible ambiguity was removed. An example from 1948:
“When I read, the other day, in the suburban-news section of a Boston newspaper, of the death of Mrs. Abigail Richardson Sawyer (as I shall call her), I was, for the moment, incredulous, for I had always thought of her as one of nature’s indestructibles.”
His writers hated this. James Thurber revised Wordsworth:
She lived, alone, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be,
But, she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference, to me.
And E.B White wrote, “Commas in the New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”
But Ross was immovable. “We have carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here,” he acknowledged to H.L. Mencken, “probably to a point approaching the ultimate. I don’t know how to get it under control.”
So on it went. A correspondent once asked Thurber why Ross had added the comma to the sentence “After dinner, the men went into the living-room.” Thurber responded, “This particular comma was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”
Elphinston: What, have you not read it through?
Johnson: No, Sir, do you read books through?
— Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791
What is gopher wood? Noah used it to build his ark, but there’s no other reference to it in the Bible.
Similarly, no one’s quite sure what a kankedort is. It appears in one passage in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde:
Was Troilus nought in a kankedort,
That lay, and myghte whisprynge of hem here,
And thoughte, “O Lord, right now renneth my sort
Fully to deye, or han anon comfort!”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines it helplessly as an awkward situation or affair and says it’s “of unascertained etymology.”
See Hapax Legomenon.
