The Reading Room

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verbose

01:02

:65833948

> I also have two copies of two copies of The Merchant of Venice

So, four copies total?

5 hours later…

CowperKettle

06:25

John Joy Bell of the day: from "Jack of All Trades", 1899:

> I'd rather be a cyclist
Than any other beast.
For tho' he slays he never stays
Upon the slain to feast.
It's pleasant to remember,
While lying on the stones,
How, tho' you're dead, you needn't dread
That he will pick your bones.
He comes! You fall!! He's gone! - that's all!!
He doesn't mind the least.
Oh! I'd rather be a cyclist
Than any other beast!

bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2012/07/jack-of-all-trades.html

2 hours later…

verbose

08:33

@CowperKettle ah. Have you read H G Wells's Kipps? A crucial plot point is when some guy runs over the titular/eponymous Kipps with a bicycle. Or maybe Kipps is the bicyclist who runs over the guy, I forget. It's a fun book

9 hours later…

Tsundoku

17:32

@verbose If we ever meet, I'll have one of them autographed by you.

@verbose One of Elsschot's novels has a character named Kips (with one 'p'). I was constantly wondering where I had encountered that name before. Now that you've mentioned Kipps, I can't help wondering whether Elsschot was making an allusion to it.

"Is that your mother in law? Then why was strychnine invented?" (Quote from Elsschot's De leeuwentemmer / The lion tamer)

2 hours later…

CowperKettle

19:28

@verbose Interesting!

Kipps (1941 film)

Kipps (US title The Remarkable Mr. Kipps) is a 1941 British comedy-drama film adaptation of H. G. Wells's 1905 novel of the same name. The film was directed by Carol Reed and stars Michael Redgrave as a draper's assistant who inherits a large fortune. The film's costumes were designed by Cecil Beaton. The film is set on the south coast of England in Edwardian times, around 1900. == Plot == The day before the fourteen-year-old Arthur "Artie" Kipps leaves to begin a seven-year apprenticeship, he asks his friend's sister, Ann Pornick, to be his girl. She gladly agrees. They split a silver sixpence...

There are even movies of it