Nor­mally I would post this at Odd Ends, but today I’m feel­ing that we need to rat­tle Jakob Nielsen’s cage a bit, so I’m post­ing it here (the blog I use for rant­ing and rail­ing and opin­ing and gruff­ing and riff­ing on sci­ence and acad­e­mia and blog­ging) instead.

Because it’s impor­tant to alien­ate your read­ers by being diverse. Or words to that effect. So no machine learn­ing, no pol­i­tics, noth­ing about the sev­eral mad sci­en­tists I know, no mus­ing about bio­log­i­cal engi­neer­ing or the future of acad­e­mia or pic­tures from old books. None of that heav­ily tuned and focused single-​​topic stuff. Some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. So you get a lit­tle spice from the dra­matic change, don’cha know.

Because after all you’re only inter­ested in the one other thing I ever talk about, right?

So, any­way: My lovely wife is sit­ting crouched and swear­ing over her lap­top in the office, where I am try­ing to do my Lin­ear Pro­gram­ming home­work. She has that pos­ture (“stance”? can one have a “stance” when seated?) one assumes when one is manip­u­lat­ing many fid­dly lit­tle cut-​​and-​​paste oper­a­tions on a lap­top. Vulching and peer­ing, I think is the cor­rect phrase. She should have a jeweler’s loupe on her fore­head and one of those enlarg­ing lensy work lights on a creaky metal arm, if you ask me (and she has a cou­ple of each, too, by the way; I should go get them now).

She’s post-​​processing a book we bought and scanned about a year back, and sent through the Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers sys­tem to be proof­read and for­mat­ted, and which now has to be stitched back together from hun­dreds of lit­tle files and made ready for repub­li­ca­tion in Project Guten­berg.

It is this book:

Flow­ers From a Per­sian Gar­den, and Other Papers by W. A. Clous­ton, “Author of Pop­u­lar Tales and Fic­tions and Book of Noo­dles; Edi­tor of A Group of East­ern Romances and Sto­ries, Book of Sindibad, Bakhti­yar Nama, Ara­bian Poetry for Eng­lish Read­ers, etc.” Lon­don: David Nutt, 270, 271, Strand. MDCCCXC.

The man who wrote it, one W. A. Clous­ton, is lit­tle known as far as I can tell. It should be oth­er­wise. He is clearly, clearly, a mem­ber of Amelia Peabody Emerson’s extended fam­ily. But in real life. I can see by read­ing between the lines that he wore a smok­ing jacket in later life: too often, I sus­pect. At some point I am sure some freck­led mous­ta­chioed hotel-​​visiting friend had a long and search­ing chat in which the pos­si­bil­ity that Clous­ton was “going native”… some­where… was explored. I know he traded droll jokes with street ped­lars (and spelled the word that way) in Kan­de­har and Shi­raz and in old Jerusalem. On more than one occa­sion he sat at the edge of the oasis in the dusk, when the camels were being sad­dled and camp was being bro­ken up, lis­ten­ing to the voices of the djinn on the wind, sip­ping whiskey from a flask he set on a nearby rock, and alter­nately lick­ing his nub of a pen­cil to write in his ragged jour­nal, and watch­ing the livid sun set beyond the dunes. He col­lected dirty jokes, and fairy sto­ries, and the won­ders of the Empire, and he traded them with his friends in let­ters (where are they now?) and privately-​​printed works in half-​​Morocco bindings.

This is that guy. You know him. You just thought he was fic­tional.^*

At any rate, hav­ing whet­ted your what­ever and piqued your other thing, I should warn you that this book is not forth­com­ing imme­di­ately, for the same rea­son that my lovely wife is swear­ing: because of the index. She needs to find every sin­gle lit­tle page ref­er­ence, and cre­ate HTML links from the page num­bers to anchors she is plac­ing in her new elec­tronic hyper­linked edi­tion of the work. It’s fid­dly, edi­to­r­ial, and immensely valu­able (and it is my hope that you dear reader will go thence and get the book, when I tell you to, and read it and admire it aloud). But in the mean­time it is slow going. All the vulching, I think.

And then an excla­ma­tion. “Hunh!”

Me: “What?”

Her: “Errata. In the index.”

And yes. There it is. Here’s the salient bit of the index:

…
Lan­glès (not Lescal­lier), 93.
La Rochefou­cauld, 23.
Lap­pländis­che Märchen, 181.
Laugh­ter, 59, 60.
Laylá and Majnún, 283.
Lazy ser­vants, 76.
Learned man and block­head, 49;
     youth, mod­esty of, 27.
Learn­ing the best trea­sure, 27;
     and virtue, 47.
Le Grand’s Fabli­aux, 96, 327, 328.
Legrand’s Pop­u­lar Greek Tales, 276.
Lescal­lier, 173–see also Lan­glès.
…

And in a foot­note on page 93 (I am told that at least 40% of the index entries lead to foot­notes, and only to footnotes):

This story has been taken from Arab Sháh into the
Bres­lau printed Ara­bic text of the Thou­sand and One
Nights, where it is related at great length. The
orig­i­nal was ren­dered into French under the title of
“Ruses des Femmes” (in the Ara­bic Ked-​​an-​​Nisa,
Strat­a­gems of Women) by Lescal­lier, and appended to his
ver­sion of the Voy­ages of Sind­bád, pub­lished at Paris in
1814, long before the Bres­lau text of The Nights was
known to exist. It also forms part of one of the Per­sian
Tales (Hazár ú Yek Rúz, 1001 Days) trans­lated by Petis
de la Croix, where, how­ever, the trick is played on the
kází, not on a young merchant.

A bit of search­ing makes it clear what “Lan­glès (not Lescal­lier)” means: Lescalier didn’t write the book in ques­tion; Lan­glès did.

I admit, I have never seen such a thing. Who wrote the index? Clous­ton him­self, in a later edi­tion? In the first edi­tion, after the proofs were back from the print­ers’? A third party, undis­closed? We have no idea.

Isn’t it inter­est­ing what one can find, when one’s surf­ing history?

There now. Return to your tech­ni­cal and polit­i­cal dis­cus­sions. I promise to stay on topic from here on, at least as much as I have in the past.

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^* It is a tes­ta­ment to Clouston’s eru­di­tion and writ­ing panache that he did not, to the best of my knowl­edge, ven­ture far­ther away from his native Glas­gow than the Orkney Islands. But he is still that guy.