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.

---

^* 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.