Enantiomorphs

"They were standing under a tree, each with an arm around the other's neck, and Alice knew which was which in a moment, because one of them had 'DUM' embroidered on his collar, and the other had 'DEE'.  'I suppose they've each got 'TWEEDLE' around at the back of the collar' she said to herself.

They stood so still that she quite forgot they were alive, and she was just looking round to see if the word 'TWEEDLE' was written at the back of each collar, when she was startled by a voice coming from the one marked 'DUM'.

'If you think we're waxworks,' he said, 'you ought to pay, you know.  Waxworks weren't made to be looked at for nothing. Nohow!'

'Contrariwise,' added the one marked 'DEE', 'if you think we're alive, you ought to speak.' "

Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there  Lewis Carroll

[after the epigram by John Byrom, on the rivalry between Handel and Giovanni Battista Bononcini]:-

"Some say compared to Bononcini,

That Mynheer Handel's but a Ninny;

Others aver, that he to Handel

Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.

Strange all this difference should be

'Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!"

1984 (in search of razor blades)

"And when memory failed and written records were falsified -- when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted and looked up.  He was in a narrow street with a few dark little shops interspersed among dwelling-houses. Immediately above his head there hung three discoloured metal balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He seemed to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside the junk-shop where he had bought the diary.

A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficiently rash act to buy the book in the beginning, and he had sworn never to come near the place again.  And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had brought him back here of his own accord.  It was precisely against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped to guard himself by opening the diary.  At the same time he noticed that although it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still open.  With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the doorway.  If questioned, he could plausibly say that he was trying to buy razor blades.

'I recognised you on the pavement,' [the shopkeeper] said immediately.  'You're the gentleman that bought the young lady's keepsake album.  That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was.  Cream-laid, it used to be called.  There's been no paper like that made for -- oh, I dare say fifty years.'  "

Nineteen Eighty-Four  George  Orwell

Holiday correspondence

"July 31st:
The beginning of the holidays signalled, as usual, by the making of appointments with dentist and doctor. …

Spend much time writing to, and hearing from unknown mothers whose sons have been invited here by Robin, and one grandmother, with whose descendant Robin is to spend a week.   Curious impossibility of combining dates and trains convenient to us all, renders this whole question harassing in the extreme.  Grandmother, especially, sends unlimited letters and telegrams, to all of which I feel bound to reply -- mostly with civil assurances of gratitude for her kindness in having Robin to stay.
Very, very difficult to find new ways of wording this -- moreover, must reserve something for letter I shall have to write when visit is safely over."

Diary of a Provincial Lady  E.M. Delafield

A profusion of lettering

"And finally, while you are still puzzling over the mystery of things, there will come to you like a revelation the knowledge that most of the amazing picturesqueness of these streets is simply due to the profusion of Chinese and Japanese characters in white, black, blue or gold, decorating everything -- even surfaces of doorposts and paper screens.  Perhaps, then, for one moment, you will imagine the effect of English lettering substituted for those magical characters; and the mere idea will give to whatever aesthetic sentiment  you may possess a brutal shock, and you will become, as I have become, an enemy of the Romaji-Kwai -- that society founded for the ugly utilitarian purpose of introducing the use of English letters in writing Japanese."

Writings from Japan  Lafcadio Hearn, edited F. King

'Mercury'

"I was half-way through the belt of trees above the water-meadow when automatically my hand went to my pocket, encountering the sharp edge of the flap of the unsealed envelope.  With no further intention in my mind I pulled it out and looked at it.  There was no address (or direction, as Mrs Maudsley called it, why I could not imagine) on the envelope: there never was.  But the open flap disclosed some writing which, at the moment, was the wrong side up.
 Among the complexities of our school code was a very wholesome respect for the Eleventh Commandment.   But we also had a strong sense of justice, and if we were found out we did not expect to be let off.
…
The rules about reading other people's letters were fairly well defined.  If you left your letters lying about and somebody read them, then it was your fault, and you were not justified in retaliation,  If somebody rifled your desk or locker and read them then it was their fault, and you were justified in taking vengeance…
...I had often passed round notes at school.  If they were sealed I should not have dreamed of reading them; if they were open I often read them -- indeed, it was usually the intention of the sender that one should, for they were meant to raise a laugh.  Unsealed, one could read them, sealed one couldn't: it was as simple as that.  The same rule applied to post-cards: one read a post-card that was sent to someone else, but not a letter.
Marian's letter was unsealed and therefore I could read it.  So why hesitate?
….
But I would not take the letter out of the envelope: I would only read the words that were exposed, and three of them were the same, as I could see from upside down.

   'Darling, darling, darling,
        Same place, same time, this evening,
    But take care not to---'

The rest was hidden by the envelope."

The Go-Between  L.P.Hartley

"Benighted Travellers"

"A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,
A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,
A candle and a written page.
Il Penseroso's Platonist toiled on
In some like chamber, shadowing forth
How the daemonic rage
Imagined everything.
Benighted travellers
From markets and from fairs
Have seen his midnight candle glimmering."

From Meditations in Time of Civil War  W. B. Yeats

"Or let my Lamp at midnight hour,
Be seen in som high lonely Towr,
Where I may oft out-watch the Bear,… "

Il Penseroso  John Milton

A Tudor writing box

Writing-box from the court of Henry VIII, wood, covered with painted and gilded leather, c. 1525
Figures represented are Mars and Venus, head of Christ and St. George, and Paris and Helen of Troy in roundels (after designs by Hans Burgkmair).

©  Victoria & Albert Museum

October passes

"It was at Rome, on the 15th October 1764, as I sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire  Edward Gibbon

Henry Mill's patent

"The invention of the typewriter, or rather an attempt to invent one, belongs to the last year of Queen Anne's reign.  On January 7th, 1714, she granted a patent to one Henry Mill, later engineer to the New River Water Company  -- the company which Anne's great-grandfather had helped found  -- for  'An Artificial Machine or Method for Impressing or Transcribing Letters Single or Progressively one after another, as in Writing, whereby all Writing whatever may be Engrossed in Paper or Parchment  so Neat and Exact as not to be distinguished from print.' "

The Jacobeans at Home  Elizabeth Burton

August 27th

"It is so cold this 27th. of August that I shake in the green-house where I am writing."

William Cowper, Correspondence 1782, (Buckinghamshire)

From The English Year  compiled by Geoffrey Grigson

Summer correspondence

"I write in a nook that I call my Boudoir.  It is a summer-house not much bigger than a sedan chair, the door of which opens into the garden, that is now crowded with pinks, roses, and honeysuckles, and the window into my neighbour's orchard...  Having lined it with garden mats, and furnished it with a table and two chairs, here I write all that I write in summer-time, whether to my friends or to the public."


Correspondence  William Cowper,  June 25, Buckinghamshire.

A judicious man

"The world's much like a fair deceitful nut,
Whereto when once the knife of truth is put
And it is opened, a right judicious eye
Finds nothing in it but meer vanitye."

Writingbook of Andrew Andrewes, 1677
National Art Library (Great Britain).  Manuscript. MSL/1960/3067

'Wette wrytyng'

" Among the rich, a standish was provided for the scrivener -- it was not considered in the least dignified for a great man to write his own letters.  The standish contained compartments for pens, inkhorns and for powdered gum sandrac -- or sand. Paper was used but parchment was necessary for official and family documents and its oily surface was prepared by rubbing in gum sandarac.  Errors were erased with a penknife, the rough places sprinkled with pounce (probably pumice) and smoothed down with a dog's tooth or an agate.  And, in passing, it is interesting to note that blotting-paper was known, and had been known for years.  Horman, writing in 1519 says  'Blottyng paper serveth to drye wette wrytyng lest there be made blottis or burris'.  "

The Elizabethans at Home  Elizabeth Burton

Christmas Day in the Morning

" 'Alack,'  said the tailor, 'I have my twist; but no more strength -- nor time-- than will serve to make me one single button-hole; for this is Christmas Day in the Morning!  The Mayor of Gloucester shall be married by noon -- and where is his cherry-coloured coat?'
He unlocked the door of the little shop in Westgate Street and Simpkin ran in, like a cat that expects something.
But there was no one there!  Not even one little brown mouse!
The boards were swept and clean; the little ends of thread and the little silk snippets were all tidied away, and gone from off the floor,
But upon the table -- oh, joy! the tailor gave a shout -- there, where he had left plain cuttings of silk -- there lay the most beautifullest coat and embroidered satin waistcoat that ever were worn by a Mayor of Gloucester.
There were roses and pansies upon the facings of the coat; and the waistcoat was worked with poppies and corn-flowers.
Everything was finished except just one single cherry-coloured button-hole, and where that button-hole was wanting there was pinned a scrap of paper with these words -- in little teeny weeny writing --

                                                                                ' NO MORE TWIST '  "


The Tailor of Gloucester  Beatrix Potter

Happy Christmas!