A Long Title

First, an announcement: I unaccountably forgot to credit Chris for recommending Shades of Grey in my marginal commentary on that book, so consider this the official erratum. Before I forget, then, my thanks to Graham for recommending the book on which I am commenting in this post.

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is a book with a long name. I don't know much about James De Mille, but if his other books have titles such as this one, then he needs to work on imaginatively shortening them. But, to be fair, the title describes what gets the story going. On account of the length of the book's title, I will be referring to the book as A Strange Manuscript throughout.

De Mille is, I think, the first Canadian author I have written a post for on The Marginal Virtues, and the second (after Aristotle; for whom, it must be said, I have not yet written a commentary proper) whose work was written before the twentieth century to be featured on this blog.

The edition I read for this blog is the New Canadian Library edition, published originally by McClelland and Stewart in 1969 (reprinted in 1985). It is the 68th in the series, so it would be worth a look to see what other titles preceded and followed it.

It has frequently been my practice to read the scholarly introduction to works such as this, and then to neglect or only haphazardly read the works themselves; for this commentary I have foregone reading the introduction (I will wait, as with Ender's Game, until after I have finished the book itself).