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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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- - - - "Old-Timey Blurb Action" We love old books. We love the way they look and the way they feel. We even love the way they smell, though we realize the odor is probably mold. The one thing we generally don't like to do with old books is read them. Frankly, old books are frequently long and wordy and boring. Our theory is that in olden times there weren't many other books for people to move on to when they were done, so no one cared if authors rambled on and on and on with no discernible point. Readers didn't have anyplace else to be. We were looking through one of our old books recently. It's a famous nineteenth-century novel by a famous American author and it's terrible. Most everyone has heard of it, but hardly anyone has read it so they don't know how bad it is. They assume it must be good because it's still so well-known. In the back of the book (this is an early-twentieth-century edition) are a dozen or so pages of ads for other books by the same publisher, all of them equally as bad as this one, we bet, if not as well remembered. For just seventy-five cents, the ads offer reissues of "great literary successes," and claim the books are "library-sized," whatever that means. Because it's our particular bias, we thought these ads would make good puzzles. Each clue will provide you with a word, abbreviation, part of speech, or proper noun. Put these answers together in each series and you will find the word that has been redacted from an old magazine or newspaper blurb promoting a library-sized literary success. The clues could be common definitions of uncommon words, or uncommon definitions of common words. For instance, if the correct answer were "melodramatic," the clues might be: 1. City in northeast Uruguay. (Melo)
Send your answers to carltondoby@hotmail.com by noon on Friday, January 23. The winner of a McSweeney's book will be chosen at random from all correct (or at least plausible) answers. - - - - THE AFFAIR AT THE INN by Kate Douglas Wiggin "As __________ clever in the writing as it is entertaining in the reading. It is actual comedy of the most artistic sort and it is handled with a freshness and originality that is unquestionably novel." 1. The portion of a hive in which honey is stored.
"A feast of humor and good cheer, yet subtly pervaded by special shades of feeling, fancy, tenderness, or __________. A merry thing in prose." 1. A vertical drum, often horse-operated, for winding in a hoisting rope.
ROSE O' THE RIVER by Kate Douglas Wiggin "A charming bit of __________, gracefully written and deftly touched with a gentle humor. It is a dainty book." 1. An aluminum coin of Indonesia, the hundredth-part of a rupiah.
"An __________ story, replete with pathos and inimitable humor. As story-telling it is perfection, and as portrait-painting it is true to the life." 1. Suffix from the Greek meaning "descendant of" used to indicate members of a zoological family.
3. TILLIE: A MENNONITE MAID by Helen R. Martin "The little Mennonite Maid who wanders through these pages is something quite new in fiction. Tillie is hungry for books and beauty and love; and she comes into her __________ at the end. Tillie is faulty, sensitive, big-hearted, eminently human, and first, last and always lovable. Her charm glows warmly, the story is well handled, the characters skillfully developed." 1. Holes ten through eighteen.
[NOTE: Certain definitions taken from the Unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language]. - - - -
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