LADY ON THE WEB

I've returned George Gissing's Commonplace Book to the library, having read only portions of it. It's the sort of book which one should own, and read aloud in the evenings to a trusted friend. (Professor H. comes under that heading, of course, but he is so absorbed with his Maya studies and chess problems, I hardly like to disturb him.)

I wish there had been more than one scant page of the original manuscript reproduced in this book. Gissing's "miniscule" handwriting is referred to as covering a thousand words per page. But I'm not sure if the paper in question is larger than today's standard typing paper; one rather thinks so, in which case the ratio is not so surprising.

One also wishes the editors had not chosen to organize this slim volume (69 pp.) into topics, but left it as he had written it.