Scribleriana

122 in next two issues) under a different title: ‘‘The Sixteen Toasts of the Rump-Steak Club: With a Prologue and Epilogue. Sold by the Booksellers of London and Westminster ,’’ for 6d (price on title). The ESTC does not record the title ‘‘Sixteen toasts.’’ • Cobnar Books listed the third known copy of A Trip to the Devil’s SummerHouse : Or a Journey to May-Fair (Joseph Hughes, 1704), an eight-leaf folio, with title-leaf missing from this disbound copy—$220. ESTC N478409, noting only Yale’s Luttrell copy (dated 7 July; Foxon T490, locating another copy at Texas). The ESTC suggests Edward Ward’s authorship (the subject seems to fit: ‘‘an account of the delights of Mayfair where ‘the woman believe ‘tis a Sin to be Chaste’’’). • Ximenes listed the sole edition of Thomas Wilkes’ The Golden Farmer: A Poem. Humbly Inscrib’d to the right Honourable Wlliam [sic] Lord Craven (T. Payne, 1723), large folio, pp. [iv], 8, in recent wrappers, with the half-title inscribed ‘‘To the Right Honble Lord Noel Somerset, the Gift of the Author,’’ plus two authorial corrections and an added couplet on p. 6 (also added to an author’s presentation copy at BL)—$1305. Foxon W460 (noting ‘‘William’’ in the title; most of copies listed are presentation copies); ESTC T75076, listing 11 copies. Penn State University—DuBois SCRIBLERIANA Our thanks to Deborah Rogers (University of Maine) and Alex Pettit (University of North Texas), who are stepping down. We appreciate their straight-ahead prose. We welcome Anna Battigelli (SUNY Plattsburgh) as Contributing Editor; she has written for us, and now we are fortunate to have more of her reviews. We would like to thank Michael Burger, Dean of the Auburn University Montgomery School of Liberal Arts, and Anne-Katrin Gramberg, Dean of the Auburn University College of Liberal Arts, for their support. For timely and valuable advice, we especially thank Melvyn New and W. B. Gerard. We are also grateful for the help of Beverly Schneller (Millersville University) and her assistant Dan McCloud. And the proofreading of Shiladitya Sen (Temple University), Taylor Manning (Auburn University Montgomery ), Melanie Brkich (University of Florida), and Lacy Marschalk (Auburn University ) has saved us from many missteps. We appreciate the support of a new sponsor , SUNY Plattsburgh. SALMAN RUSHDIE’S CONVERSATIONS ‘‘But one of the things I tried hard to do in Midnight’s Children, probably one of the hardest things to do in the structure of the book, was to create images or symbols which have different resonances for Indian readers and Western readers. For example, Saleem’s nose. In America and England people writing about the nose and its comic uses put it into the tradition of Tristram Shandy and Gogol and Cyrano de Bergerac, and they’re quite right. Those were not unconscious references. But there were also purely Indian references, which Western critics tended not to pick up. The nose is a comic version of the trunk of the elephant-headed god Ganesh, to whom Saleem compares himself a few times.’’ (1982) 123 ‘‘The writers I was much more conscious of while writing are Sterne and Dickens and Swift.’’ (1983) ‘‘I didn’t consciously think of a single writer as a model. Even the correspondences with Sterne were for a time unconscious, and I only realized that Tristram Shandy had gone before me when I was some way into the drafts. When I remembered it, I did little bits of stylistic underlining, to make sure that people knew that I knew.’’ (1983) (Conversations with Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael Reder, Mississippi, 2000, pp. 2, 17, 47.) JAVIER MARIAS AND STERNE In Spanish novelist Javier Marı́as’s 1989 novel, All Souls, one of the Oxford dons, Toby Rylands, retires at age 70 but asserts that ‘‘I am not inactive. I’m writing the best book ever on Laurence Sterne and his Sentimental Journey. . . . I love that book and it matters to me that it should be properly understood . . . .’’ Unfortunately, Rylands dies before he puts a word to paper, but the allusion to Sterne is not entirely unexpected: Marı́as translated Tristram Shandy into Spanish in 1978. APHRA BEHN ONLINE The editors invite submissions for the...