I bought a new Bleak House today. The one with the nicer paratext, that is, pictures. So there's no need to go looking through every copse looking for my previous copy (see BELOW). Let it return to the elements.
I was very pleased with my new book. But. Then I found another version in the university book store. It had a preface by Terry Eagleton. I'm a big Eagleton fan--an Eagletonite. So this version had nice pictures AND a preface by Terry Eagleton; its paratext trumped the paratext of my new Bleak House.
Did I buy that one too? Somehow I managed to resist the temptation. Instead I went and bought a pen and notebook and came back to the third Bleak House, to the Eagleton preface, and took notes.
I must have looked a sight, standing there in the aisle of the university bookstore, scribbling notes into a notebook. Academics are strange but this may have gone beyond the pale.
What will he do next, bring his dulcimer into a bookstore and sing the poems of Robert Burns? Or better yet Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. But then folks would look at the book and say, "Of course, Blake--Blake does that to people."
Anyway, please benefit from my weirdness:
"One of the very images that unifies the fragmentary world of the novel [Bleak House]...testifies at the same time to that world's mysterious impenetrability," Terry Eagleton, Preface to the 2003 Printing of the Penguin Classic version of Bleak House.
Posted by jeb at October 7, 2004 11:56 PM | TrackBack