Eating With One Hand

On another of those annual returns to the Aubrey-Maturin series of books by Patrick O’Brian, I recently came across the passage in The Reverse of the Medal (Book 11) where Dr Maturin, along with his good friend, Sir Joseph is engrossed in a preserved collection of snakes, frogs and insects. Their fascination is interrupted by the housekeeper announcing dinner…  

  

  ‘If the gentlemen would like to eat their dinner while it is hot,’ said Sir Joseph’s housekeeper in a carefully restrained voice, ‘perhaps they will come now.’

  ‘Heavens, Mrs Barlow,’ said Sir Joseph, peering at the clock behind a heap of preserved serpents, ‘I am afraid we are late.’

  ‘Could we not eat it in our hand?’ asked Stephen. ‘Like a sandwich?’

  ‘No, sir, you could not,’ said Mrs Barlow. ‘A soufflé is not a sandwich. Though it may be very like a pancake if you do not come directly.’

  ‘People say unkind things about Lord Sandwich,’ observed Stephen as they sat down, ‘but I think mankind is very much in his debt for that genial invention…’  — Patrick O’Brian, The Reverse of the Medal

These days it is hard for people anywhere to imagine life without sandwiches. Who doesn't sometimes eat at a desk, or grip a sandwich in one hand, a steering wheel in the other? We all have our favorites as well as the restaurants, bars, delis or cafés that serve up a limitless variety that the Earl of Sandwich could never have imagined. I grew up eating mayonnaise between two slices of bread, working my way up to fried Spam sandwiches and years later discovering the incredible Watterson sandwich at Beef O’Brady’s—a double handful of roast beef and Swiss cheese on grilled rye with mayo, lettuce, tomato, pickle and onion. During the time I spent in Japan I often encountered a trio of sandwiches that always jangled my thoughts on the art of combining ingredients. The first was a potato salad sandwich, and then a noodle sandwich and finally a strawberry and cream sandwich. Eventually I tried all three, but let’s just say that once was enough.

The Dutch were eating something resembling a sandwich in the 17th century, where tavern owners hung beef from the rafters, cutting it into thin slices to lay over bread spread with butter, but the sandwich didn’t get its name until 1762 when British statesman and 4th Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu got hungry during long hours at the poker table. He asked his servant to bring him something to eat that wouldn’t interfere with the game. Hearing the Earl’s request, the cook took slices of roast beef and put them between pieces of toast. For a card player it was the perfect solution—a hearty meal eaten with one hand and still able to hold cards in the other. The Earl being an influential man, other players soon began calling for “the same as Sandwich.” We find this anecdote in the eighteenth-century travel book Tour to London, by Pierre Jean Grosley, but there is little more than rumor to substantiate the claim. Sandwich’s biographer offers an alternative, that the Earl’s commitments to the navy, politics and the arts make it more likely that the first sandwich was eaten at his work desk.

Dr Maturin's comment above that people said unkind things about Lord Sandwich, is based on historical fact about the man and his habits. Montagu (1718-1792) was well-known as a man of promiscuous habits and a love of gambling. During his lifetime he held a number of military and political offices, being at one time Postmaster General, First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary of State. Sandwich was a great supporter of Captain Cook, who during his exploration of the Pacific Ocean named the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) after his patron. Montagu retired from public life in 1782 and many might have hinted that it was a retirement too late in coming. His incompetence and corruption were broad enough to prompt a suggestion that a proper epitaph would be: “Seldom has any man held so many offices and accomplished so little.”

The Lure of O’Brian

Around the end of February I once more jumped into the Aubrey/Maturin series of novels by Patrick O’Brian. Like many other O’Brian fans, I have never grown tired over the years of returning to these books for another reading. There seems no end to the thrill and fascination of them, coming back to me each time as fresh as wet ink. It is a long series, but one so rich in period detail filled with colorful characters, history of the Napoleonic Wars and life aboard nineteenth century sailing ships, all composed in the nearest thing to perfect prose—it’s easily my choice for what to take to a deserted island. I finished another reading of Post Captain, the second book on Saturday.

Difficult to single out one particular aspect, but my greatest attraction to Patrick O’Brian’s books is probably the language. I well know that there are millions of readers who shy away from the kind of prose found in O’Brian, calling it archaic, difficult, affected and thick, and I offer no defense for that. I just happen to like it. There’s always something to make us laugh (or cringe) in the Aubrey/Maturin books and looking for a spicy example from Post Captain to share, I took a hint from another fan of the series. Here is a passage, a brief medical diagnosis. Dr Ramis is addressing his friend, Stephen Maturin…

‘You speak of loss of weight. But I find that you yourself are thin. Nay, cadaverous, if I may speak as one physician to another. You have a very ill breath; your hair, already meagre two years ago, is now extremely sparse; you belch frequently; your eyes are hollow and dim. This is not merely your ill-considered use of tobacco—a noxious substance that should be prohibited by government—and of laudanum. I should very much like to see your excrement.’

On another occasion Dr Maturin could give tit for tat, but in this case he merely assures his friend that he would be happy to oblige. And it is through the mouth of Stephen Maturin that O’Brian launches his most entertaining floods of humor. Another passage from Post Captain includes this exchange:

‘This is an ugly stretch of road, with all these disbanded soldiers turned loose. They made an attempt upon the mail not far from Aker’s Cross. Come, let me have your pistols. I thought as much: what is this?’

‘A teratoma,’ said Stephen sulkily.

‘What is a teratoma?’ asked Jack, holding the object in his hand. ‘A kind of grenado?’

‘It is an inward wen, a tumour: we find them, occasionally, in the abdominal cavity. Sometimes they contain long black hair, sometimes a set of teeth: this has both hair and teeth. It belonged to Mr Elkins of the City, an imminent cheesemonger. I prize it much.’

‘By God,’ cried Jack, thrusting it back into the holster and wiping his hand vehemently upon the horse, ‘I do wish you would leave people’s bellies alone. So, you have no pistols at all, I collect?’

‘If you wish to be absolute, no, I have not.’

Reading something recently about the origin of old expressions, I learned an interesting tidbit about the beginnings of the example, ‘pin-money.’ Some may not remember or be familiar with it, and without much thought I always supposed it referred to money set aside. Later in the day I was reading the O’Brian book and with what I suppose is serendipity, came across a passage wherein a gentleman is entrusting his female charges into Captain Aubrey’s care:

‘Oh, never mind them. They are only girls, you know—they can rough it—don’t put yourself out. Think what you will save them in pin-money…’

In the late Middle Ages, to remedy a pin shortage and the hoarding of pins, the British government passed a law allowing pin makers to sell their pins only on certain days of the year. On the specified days many women flocked to the shops to buy pins, many of them taking their carefully saved ‘pin money.’ At the time, pins were relatively expensive, but when prices dropped following industrialization of the pin making process, the expression ‘pin-money’ also got devalued and came to mean something along the lines of pocket money, or a small amount.

At least the delights in reading O’Brian are never a small amount.

Off to Sea

‘Come, sir, cannot I prevail upon you to go to sea? A man-of-war is the very thing for a philosopher, above all in the Mediterranean: there are the birds, the fishes—I could promise you some monstrous strange fishes—the natural phenomena, the meteors, the chance of prize-money…’

Lured by the call of deep-water adventures I have once more taken up the first book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series of historical novels, wherein the reader is swept up in life aboard an English sailing ship during the Napoleonic Wars. O’Brian and his books have been the subject here on a few other occasions, usually popping up about the time I begin another reading of the long series. With the thickness of pages involved some would call me obsessed, and it’s not a label I object to regarding the writing of Patrick O’Brian. The 6,500 pages of the complete Aubrey/Maturin series are with each reading richer and more satisfying. O’Brian’s popular roman-fleuve is gorgeously textured, an endlessly fascinating tale set among officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as great ships close in battle.

The first novel, Master and Commander, was published in 1969 and the last complete novel in 1999. The twenty-first novel was left unfinished by O’Brian’s death in 2000, but published as is in 2004. The books were written and published in the chronological sequence of events they describe, beginning with Master and Commander in 1800 and carrying through to the final novels, set shortly after Waterloo. W.W. Norton & Company discovered the Aubrey/Maturin novels twenty years after their first British publication and for some reason their later editions were taken more seriously by critics, enjoing greater success. The novels sold over 400,000 copies in 1989-90, reaching over two million by 2000. Norton released the novels in e-book format in December of 2011.

To repeat a warning offered in an earlier post, more than one reader has complained that the abundance of puzzling nautical terms sets the head spinning, discouraging the reader. In defense, the words of Stephen Maturin, Captain Aubrey’s friend and ship’s doctor help explain how O’Brian took this problem to hand. Early in the first book, the doctor says, “No man could easily surpass me in ignorance of naval terms.” This ignorance is a continuing fount of humor throughout the books, but at the same time we laugh, it subtly aligns us with the character. Maturin’s ignorance about the workings of ships is reassurance to the reader, telling us we don’t have to know or remember the details.

As far as the language goes, O’Brian once commented, “Obviously, I have lived very much out of the world: I know little of post-modernity, post-structuralism, hard rock or rap, and I cannot write with much conviction about the contemporary scene.” But such considerations do not concern the reader; the writer’s narrative voice is contemporary with his setting. One critic has suggested that O’Brian’s naval officers would be at their ease speaking with the characters in a Jane Austen novel. The language transports us to another time and place in the sense that it seems to have been written there and then. In reading the Aubrey/Maturin series there is always the feeling that the writer is a contemporary of his characters, and the books not historical novels at all, but classic tales reinvented.

O’Brian shunned typewriters and word processors or computers, writing all of his books and stories by hand. For those of us curious about the author’s favorite pen, the answer remains clouded, but we can at least know that whatever the pen, O’Brian filled it with black cartridges. In the unfinished last novel, 21 there is the handwritten note, “If I go back to [illegible] I might look for pen-cartridges.” The handwritten manuscripts for eighteen of the Aubrey/Maturin novels have been acquired by Indiana University’s Lilly Library. Only two in the series—The Letter of Marque and Blue at the Mizzen—remain in private hands.

Another Side of Patrick O’Brian

Patrick O’Brian, the author best known for his roman fleuve series of novels featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr Stephen Maturin, enjoyed for the last years of his life, a financial success that had eluded him for many years. It was only in the 1990s that American fervor for the Aubrey-Maturin series brought him lasting financial security. Long before he began writing the Aubrey-Maturin books in 1970, O’Brian struggled to get his work published. A first collection of his stories was published in 1950 under the title, The Last Pool. One story in that early collection is a work that included a good amount of autobiography. Like American writer, J.D. Salinger, O’Brian fiercely guarded his private life, but in this early story, the setting, as well as conditions in the protagonist’s life are reflections of the writer’s own experiences. The story is called, “The Happy Despatch.”

It is an emotionally charged work, a very dark story characteristic of O’Brian’s situation throughout the 1940s, and it paints a vivd picture of Man’s hopelessness against the forces of Nature. The two main characters are what anyone would deem a masterpiece of characterization, and telegraph a skill that would emerge full bloom twenty years later in the Aubrey-Maturin books. The main character is a failed man of upper class origins named Woolen. The name itself is a hint at his character, at his sheep-like personality. O’Brian says it this way: ‘He was an incongruous figure, with his mild, sheep-like face and bowed, apologetic shoulders…’ I particularly like his description, ‘incongruous figure,’ an elegant expression portraying awkward and inharmonious.

The other character is Woolen’s wife, ‘a deathless shrew…Her face was a disagreeable purple and flour lay thick upon it; her body, of ponderous bulk, was covered with a deep layer of pale grey fat. She did not wash: she had many disgusting personal habits…wrapped in a mauve thing, on her creaking couch, with a malevolent blur in place of a mind.’

Let no one say that Patrick O’Brian could not put flesh and life’s blood into his characters.

“The Happy Despatch” is about the man, Woolen, someone constantly bullied and taken advantage of. Making nothing of an army career, he proceeds to fail in business, his savings stolen by the man who took him into partnership. Desperate, out of alternatives and along with his horrible wife, he goes to a remote farming village in Wales to try his hand at farming. Spurned by neighbors, turned away by all, his feeble attempts to earn money at farming are doomed by his lack of know how. The single joy in his life is the one day a week he spends fishing in the highlands.

While fishing one afternoon, a day that brings a splendid catch of trout, he makes a life changing discovery there in a high valley. Near his fishing spot is an ancient mound of mysterious origins, around which the river flows, The current suddenly dislodges a large stone at a point near the mound, and before the fisherman’s eyes a huge cache of buried golden coins cascades out onto the riverbank. Recovering from shock, Woolen stuffs his pockets with gold and hides the rest until able to return. Out of breath and overburdened, he heads across the valley toward a town on the other side of the pass, a place he knows will exchange the gold for currency. Tired and disoriented, his mind a flurry of emotions, he fails to note the danger of his pathway over the mountain pass. Suddenly a misstep sends him falling into a deep chasm. O’Brian ends his story with this line: ‘But in the pass he met the keeper of the hoard.’

For those fans of Patrick O’Brian’s long series of Aubrey-Maturin novels who might not be familiar with his early writing, try The Rendezvous and Other Stories.

The Captain’s Table

‘All flesh is grass: and it has been said that the man who finds out how to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before serves the republic admirably well.

It may also be said that a woman who causes two dishes to stand upon an American table is more valuable than the hero of any election. This is particularly true when the second dish is that noble pudding, a spotted dog, gleaming on its plate and accompanied by true egg custard.’ — Patrick O’Brian, France 1997.

These words come from the Forward of a delightful companion book to Patrick O’Brian’s twenty-one volume collection of novels. The book is called Lobscouse & Spotted Dog—Which It’s a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey-Maturin novels. One of the many joys of reading the 6,510 pages of O’Brian’s series is the detail surrounding the food and meals eaten on a 19th century English sailing ship during the era of the Napoleonic Wars. In their book, Anne Chotzinoff Grossman and Lisa Grossman Thomas have compiled a collection of recipes for the numerous and often humorous dishes served to captain and crew, as well as honored guests in the pages of the Aubrey-Maturin anthology. The description of the meals, the pervasiveness and importance of food entranced the two O’Brian fan-writers, as it probably has many, many others. Like most of us, they wondered about things like lobscouse, burgoo and spotted dog. Their book is the result of that curiosity.

‘Bless me,’ cried Jack, with a loving look at its glistening, faintly translucent sides, ‘a spotted dog!’

‘We thought as how you might like one, sir,’ said Pullings. ‘Allow me to carve you a slice.’ — from The Ionian Mission

SPOTTED DOG

The authors describe this as a handsome object, brown and appetizing; it has a moist, dense, cake-like texture; it is sweet but not too sweet, spicy but not too spicy, and altogether satisfying.

Ingredients:

4 cups flour

¼ cup sugar

½ teaspoon salt

1½ teaspoons ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

1¾ cups dried currants

½ pound suet, finely grated

1 cup milk

2 eggs, lightly beaten

Preparation: In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Stir in the currants. Mix in the suet. Add the milk and eggs, and work the mixture thoroughly with your hands. Scrape the batter into a greased 6-cup pudding basin. Tie a well-floured cloth over the pudding. Place the pudding in a pot of boiling water, cover and steam for 2 hours. Unmold and serve hot, accompanied by custard sauce.

MUSHROOM KETCHUP

A terrible sounding concoction from the section on condiments from the galley and ship’s hold…

This ‘condiment’ is not supposed to require refrigeration, but after a few weeks it grows a fur that can be skimmed off, whereupon the ketchup is perfectly usable.

Ingredients:

1 pint strong stale beer

10 anchovies, or 1 can of fillets, rinsed

4 large shallots, peeled and coarsely chopped

5 ounces large flap mushrooms

1 two-inch knob fresh ginger

1 teaspoon pepper

½ teaspoon mace

10 whole cloves

Preparation: Put all ingredients into a saucepan, bring to a boil and simmer gently about 30 minutes, or until liquid is reduced by half. Strain and bottle.

One interesting—perhaps amazing and altogether unbelievable—list offered in this book is one taken from the sixth book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, The Fortune of War. Suspected of espionage by his American captors, Captain Aubrey offers explanation of some questionable papers:

‘These are victualling notes,’ he said. ‘compiled according to a system of my own. You will see that they add up to a yearly consumption of one million eighty-five thousand two hundred and sixty-six pounds of fresh meat; one million one hundred and sixty-seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-five pounds of biscuit and one hundred and eighty-four thousand three hundred and fifty-eight pounds of soft tack; two hundred and seventeen thousand eight hundred and thirteen pounds of flour; one thousand and sixty-six bushels of wheat; one million two hundred and twenty-six thousand seven hundred and thirty-eight pints of wine, and two hundred and forty-four thousand nine hundred and four pints of spirits.’

A Basket of Good Things

Weather today has played some dismal notes on my frame of mind. Rain, sleet and finally snow in all its metropolitan inconvenience make me yearn for different scenery, something to brighten and bring warmth to an opposite outward aspect. So I sit recalling the good things of past days, those out of the ordinary tidbits that have made me stop and exclaim, “Awright!”

Fountain Pen and Ink of the Week

Most every day for the past week I have used my Pelikan 200, dripping with the punchbowl red of Caran d’Ache Sunset ink. Please don’t misunderstand my use of ‘dripping’ to mean pen and ink are behaving badly. Both are splendid and just the thing for foul weather days.

A Drawing Much Appreciated These Days

An artist friend of mine told me last time we met to look through a stack of sketches and take one I liked. The nude life study (ten minute pose with a live model) in the photo here is something I found in that stack. I put it in the plainest of black frames with white matting.

Soundtrack: 187

Something I’ve almost worn out with repeated play, this is an oldie from 1997, a movie that starred Samuel L. Jackson. Artists include Massive Attack, Everything But The Girl, Galliano, Jalal and Bang Bang. Listen to some clips here.

Blog Posts Enjoyed More Than Once

Julie at Whatever put up a post on February 15 called, “A Year in the Life of a Tree,” which is a 52 week record of the gradual changes in her Golden Raintree. By all means look at it if you haven’t already. It’s here.

Check out the February 24 post on Inkyjournal with an especially good video from Aurora Pens called, “How to Make a Fountain Pen.” A very interesting five minute video.

Favorite Word of the Week

This is another of those rare and hard to look up words from the 19th century mind of writer Patrick O’Brian. In Chapter 8 of The Ionian Mission, No. 8 in the Aubrey/Maturin series, he writes, “…But what is much more to the point, what a set of clinchpoops we should look, was we to raise Cavaleria before the French.”

‘Clinchpoop’ is defined in the dictionary as: a lout, jerk, clod, boor, slob, boob, fathead, sap, moron and idiot. It also has two other less than pleasant meanings which I will leave out here.

Poem of the Week

“Elegy for the Personal Letter” by Allison Joseph. Read it here. (March 9, 2010 in the archive.)

With this basket of good things, I push away the chill and gloom of a day beset by rain, sleet and snow.

Dubious Dinner Partners

Reading Patrick O’Brian today, I came upon a passage that, while not especially significant to the whole, gives an excellent sense of the writer’s facility with words, and a small sample of his humor. I’ve been sitting these last few minutes thinking about how I can best offer up this snippet of O’Brian’s prose without offending the female half of my readers. Where is the danger in that, you may wonder. Excerpts can be misleading since they preclude a full understanding of the characters and the situation. Certainly the writing of O’Brian is cultured (exceedingly so), old-fashioned and not by any stretch designed to offend. Nonetheless, it is possible to get the wrong idea about his characters from isolated examples of their conversation. So, let me set it up in a fair manner, explaining the background of the chosen excerpt.

The speakers are Captain Jack Aubrey, commanding the warship, HMS Surprise, and his good friend, Stephen Maturin, the ship’s doctor. The time is the early 19th century (1804-06) and the place is southeast of India, somewhere in the Indian Ocean, aboard the Surprise. This exchange between the two follows a sumptuous dinner aboard a passing East India merchant ship. A hint of warning—though it could be interpreted erroneously, neither Aubrey or Maturin fit the description of a misogynist.

From Patrick O’Brian’s HMS Surprise, third volume in the Aubrey/Maturin series; Chapter Nine, pages 278-79 (Norton paperback edition, 1991).

Aubrey speaks first…

‘… A most capital dinner, upon my word. The duck was the best I have ever tasted.’

‘I was sorry to see you help yourself to him a fourth time: duck is a melancholy meat. In any case the rich sauce in which it bathed was not at all the thing for a subject of your corpulence. Apoplexy lurks in dishes of that kind. I signalled to you, but you did not attend.’

‘Is that why you were looking so mumchance?’

‘I was displeased with my neighbours, too.’

The nymphs in green? Delightful girls.’

‘It is clear you have been a great while at sea, to call those sandy-haired coarse-featured pimply short-necked thick-fingered vulgar-minded lubricious blockheads by such a name. Nymphs, forsooth. If they were nymphs, they must have had their being in a tolerably rank and stagnant pool: the wench on my left had an ill breath, and turning for relief I found her sister had a worse; and the upper garment of neither was free from reproach. Worse lay below, I make no doubt. “La, sister,” cries the one to the other, beaming across me—vile teeth; and “La, sister,” cries the other. I have no notion of two sisters wearing the same clothes, the same flaunting meretricious gawds, the same tortured Gorgon curls low over their brutish criminal foreheads; it bespeaks a superfetation of vulgarity, both innate and studiously acquired. And when I think that their teeming loins will people the East…Pray pour me out another cup of coffee. Confident brutes.’

… ‘Well, and so you did not altogether like them, I collect? I am sorry for it. My neighbour and I agreed wonderfully well…’

Brief, but with spice enough.

For anyone interested in some earlier comments about O’Brian and the Aubrey/Maturin series, take a look at my earlier post of January 31, Loaded to the Gunwales.

Loaded to the Gunwales

In 1970 Patrick O’Brian began writing what was to become a long, extended series of twenty-one historical novels set during the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century, but more particularly set on a dozen or more sailing ships of the British Royal Navy. These books are the roman-fleuve tales of Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and ship’s surgeon, Stephen Maturin. Most readers generally refer to the whole collection as the Aubrey-Maturin series, but many are now familiar with the title, Master and Commander as a result of the 2003 film starring Russell Crowe as Captain Aubrey. That movie was based on the first book in the series, Master and Commander, as well as characters and events in three subsequent books in the series.

I will happily admit to being one of Mr O’Brian’s more fervent fans, and have long enjoyed his writing in a long list of novels and stories apart from the better known Aubrey-Maturin series. This past Friday I began my third reading of the twenty-one book series. But what would possess a reader to repeatedly undertake such a long and drawn out plan of rereading? While I can’t speak for others, the answer in my case needs a mere two words: the language. Apart from everything else that makes these books outstanding, the experience of reading them is akin to the slow enjoyment of crème brulee and a very fine wine. I often find myself rereading aloud sentences and paragraphs only because the first time was insufficient to absorb the richness of O’Brian’s writing.

The language of O’Brian while fitting the description of modern, is still filled with difficult terms and phrases related to ships and sailing, while speech is true to the era with all its slang, and idioms. It definitely can be a challenge to the reader, but oddly enough has an addictive quality in which you come to almost yearn for even more talk of catharpings, shove-groat and slubberdegullions. I have been told by more than one person that the abundance of unknown nautical terms finally wore them down and caused them to leave the first book unfinished. Let me use the words of Stephen Maturin to help explain how skillfully O’Brian has taken the problem to hand. Early in the first book, Maturin says, “No man could easily surpass me in ignorance of naval terms.” This ignorance of his provides a good bit of humor throughout, but it also subtly aligns the character with the reader, who usually shares the same ignorance. Maturin’s ignorance reassures the reader, and bear in mind that this ignorance has been given to one you would surely call the smartest character in the series.

The fact is, the Aubrey-Maturin books make you want to know more about all sorts of things, including sailing ships, history and geography, as well as Maturin’s birds and beasts. I suspect there are many who would say that reading these books has turned out to be something of an education. Well, it’s all so much for this old grizzled head I have to reread them every three or four years.

I found it an interesting tidbit of information that Patrick O’Brian spurned typewriters and word processors, preferring to write every word of his huge lifelong oeuvre by hand. I wonder what his preferred fountain pen might have been? The final and unfinished book (21) in the series includes in the five volume reissue put out by W. W. Norton and Company in 2004, a facsimile of O’Brian’s original manuscript, with all the editing and rewrites.

Have I interested anyone in making a go at reading 6,980 closely printed pages?