1882, William Edward Winks.

We just scanned it. It will be released into Distributed Proofreaders as soon as the copyright clearance is available.

I cannot explain to you why such a thing has been done. Neither my scanning of the work, nor my wife’s request via the tortuous Interlibrary Loan system at the AADL, nor Mr. Winks’s original notion to write a multiple biography of men who made shoes.

I cannot.

Nor can I explain why the work is so well known. I’ve seen commoner books with fewer Google hits.

But above everything else—above the wonder of the book’s existence, above the question of why we have sought it out and preserved it, above the implications to the memory of the world—I wonder whether Mr. Winks would, to his peers, have been considered a small man. Was he slight? Of unimposing stature? Perhaps of boyish frame?

Was he wee?