Paul Johnson’s article in the Spectator makes the point that Jane Austen’s novels are as enjoyable for what they leave out as for what they contain, and includes a fascinating anecdote about Austen scholar Mary Lascelles. (more…)
The Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner has an article celebrating librarians (which we agree is an excellent thing to do) that includes a fascinating piece of trivia about the apocryphal tale of Abner Doubleday’s invention of baseball.
In 1939, a librarian at the New York Public Library named Robert Henderson disproved the Doubleday story during baseball’s purported centennial celebration by demonstrating that baseball had evolved from the British game “rounders.”
The Britannica seemed to relish quoting Jane Austen’s remarks in her 1798 novel, “Northanger Abbey,” about her heroine preferring “cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running round the country at the age of fourteen, to books.”
The main difference between the games is that base-runners in rounders are put out by hitting them with a thrown padded ball instead of tagging them. Tagging’s an American innovation that allows the use of harder balls that travel farther when batted, thus requiring a larger playing field and producing a faster-paced game.
The Editrix is thoroughly amused by the idea of steroid-pumped athletes hurling projectiles at one another, but even more so by the finish of the article:
Speaking of bookstores, reference books make excellent gifts, reminding the recipient of your generosity every time they use it. The compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, costs only $250 compared with the $900 full-sized set, and it revealed to this amused father of three stimulating daughters that a giglet is “a giddy, laughing, romping girl.”
Rather like the young Catherine Morland!
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