Remainders- From the Times Literary Supplement 1980-1989

'Remainders'- the very word sends a shiver through publishers. Eric Korn's popular and controversial Times Literary Supplement columns are something else: as an antiquarian book dealer, his Remainders are wads of perculiar, recondite information and wit acquired accidentally among dusty tomes and on extensive travels in Europe, Asia, Africa and America.

He acquires a seventeenth century volume with verses subscribed 'A.M.' Is this an unknown poem by Andrew Marvell? Over subsequent weeks he pursues the quest for proof through comic and ludicrous backwaters of scholarship. Like Odysseus he finds that the journey, not the arrival, provides adventure.

He goes to Dublin for the Centenary Bloomsday and discovers how inexhaustibly absurd the menials of the Joyce Industry (Professors, Lecturers, Journalists and others) can be. He goes to the Americas, to Malta and Gozo, learning languages and , from the perspective of Melanesian or Pidgin, shining a torch back on 'English and other speech disorders'. Sometimes he travels 'hostage class'; if no direct flight is available he fantasises his journeys. Bibliography has never had so entertaining a champion: linguistics, no longer recondite, invite us into a genial Babel. Korn's satire takes in censorship in all its forms, double-speak and journalism, modern politics and publishing.

Half Title, Title, Dedication, Plan of the Book. xi plus 213 pages of imaginative text.

Fine

ISBN 9780856 358470