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Overloading the Machine
Will Wrote for Love
Will tossed his homework, the thick manuscript finished last night, into the puddle ahead of her slender left foot. While less absorbent than the cavalier's handkerchief, it was more intellectual, and also thicker (so as to better elevate the lovely lady foot out of danger). He finished his follow-through with a dramatically upturned nose and a wistful gaze skyward.
Diane's sharp heel pierced the first few pages, drawing a bead of water from the puddle below to spread silt trails across the title page. Will gasped at the power wielded by the words he'd chosen to invoke the image of that exact heel in the third line of his second sonnet. Never before had his poetry so precisely summoned reality. He whipped the pad from his breast pocket and hurried to caputre a vividly imagined kiss in two perfect iambs, just as Diane stepped past him, a small corner of pentameter still flapping from her heel.
The Least Successful Collector
Betsy Baker played a central role in the history of collecting. She
was employed as a servant in the house of John Warburton (1682-1759) who had
amassed a fine collection of 58 first edition plays, including most of the
works of Shakespeare.
One day Warburton returned home to find 55 of them charred beyond
legibility. Betsy had either burned them or used them as pie bottoms. The
remaining three folios are now in the British Museum.
The only comparable literary figure was the maid who in 1835 burned
the manuscript of the first volume of Thomas Carlyle's "The Hisory of the
French Revolution", thinking it was wastepaper.
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
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