ljgeoff

I got to see the particular texts I wanted to see, and one of them was actually the originally typescript with ms corrections and emendations of the Play That Was Banned By The Censor in 1907 unless the author agreed to remove all references to something that was, in fact, fairly key a) to the overall action and b) to the symbolism.

Also the published version of the 1920s updated revised version (finally passed for production in the 1930s).

Also a critical study of the playwright in question which had a few useful things to say.

However, I also wanted to look at a couple of volumes of Time and Tide to see if it had anything to say about questions relating to the issues on which I am giving a paper of which all this is part, and I did not want to look at the microfilm, and there were two sets of the printed version which were on 48-hr+ retrieval (on reflection, this would have worked for today, but I was planning on going in yesterday) and there was what appeared to be the hard copy with a rather odd reference and produceable only in Rare Books and Manuscripts, but it was something I could order in reasonable expectation that it would be there on my arrival -

Except this was one of those maddening things when a catalogue or a cataloguer has picked up something - in this case, I am presuming a few odd issues of T&T forming part of some person's papers - and catalogued them as if they were the whole journal: the description certainly did not indicate to the contrary.

This is exactly the sort of thing that made me dubious during former job about the proposition to put everything into one huge searchable catalogue... which can work if you're really clear if something is a manuscript or a file in an archive, etc, in the description. (And even then people get confused.) (People were always getting confused and thinking one file about person or organisation in somebody's else's papers/some institution's archives was the papers/archives of person or organisation, sigh.)

What I read

Finished Amnesty, and I think that was a good ending: not descending into grimdark but not fluffy-bunnies either, in keeping with the general tenor and a small note of hope.

Also finally finished The Strange Case of Harriet Hall and really, this is yet another 'neglected Golden Age detective novelist' that one can see why, really.

Catherine Dain, Dead Man's Hand (1997), which is the one where our protag has reached a place where the reader can see that perhaps the author did not quite know where to go next, which is the problem when you have a protag who changes and grows and is affected by the things that happen... I also started Dain's Angel in the Dark (A New Age Mystery #1) (1999), which failed to grab me and went into the donation bag. (Apparently there was a #2 in this series which I shall not be seeking out.)

And then I fell down an Amanda Cross rabbit hole, no, I don't know why, it just happened, they were on the shelf and I succumbed, I'm not even reading them in any particular order: Honest Doubt (2000), The Edge of Doom (2002), An Imperfect Spy (1995), The Puzzled Heart (1998), A Trap for Fools (1989), The Players Come Again (1990). And my sense is that Cross/Carolyn Heilbrun was having fun with these and being playful and not caring if they adhered to the Detective Club rules or even had a murder in them and was using that strategy of writing in genre so that she could do the late C20th version of 'o, it is only a novel' while having plots in which noxious professors get defenestrated, women bond &/or find life after unsatisfactory marriage, etc.

On the go

Amanda Cross, Poetic Justice (1970) - this must be one, I think, I bought somewhere like Sisterwrite or Compendium Books, way back in the day.

Charlotte Lennox still on the go.

Up next

Apart from more Amanda Cross, I have, I think, somewhere, a couple of collections of Heilbrun's essays.