Quote:
Originally Posted by grannyGrumpy
I haven't any specific book in mind for an "antique vintage" project, does anybody have a request? [yes, I plan to make an alternate "clean" version as well.  ] |
One book that might be appropriate for you (with your interest in wit and odd turns of phrase) might be the two volumes which comprise the
Essays of Elia and
Last Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb. You wouldn't have to sift through conflicting editions, and the spelling and punctuation wouldn't be inconsistent, but you
would find yourself rendering hoary punctuation practices, an odd vocabulary even for a Lake poet, quirky sentence structure and (if you liked) stained and timeworn pages.
Personally, I'd love to see a vintage edition of this version, which I myself own:
Note that that edition also contains illustrations (which I know you like to include).
Sample language from "A Chapter on Ears" (substitute an em dash for each double hyphen):
Quote:
I have no ear.--
Mistake me not, reader--nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me. I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets--those indispensable side-intelligencers.
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Of particular interest is Lamb's essay on "The Races of Men," which he delineates as the Men Who Lend and the Men Who Borrow, concluding immediately that the Men Who Lend are tentative, furtive and apologetic, while The Men Who Borrow comprise "The Great Race."
You might also be interested in looking at (if not creating an edition of)
The Autobiography of Benjamin Robert Haydon, the most famous chapter of which concerns an "Immortal Dinner" at which the attendees were Keats, Wordsworth, Lamb and -- for some unfathomable reason -- a vacuous postmaster who persisted in asking Wordsworth questions like, "Don’t you think Newton a great genius?" until a drunken Lamb staggered over to him with a candle and inquired, "Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?"
Both Haydon and Lamb date from the romantic period and are quite famous, so I believe you'd have your pick of sources.
Other English Romantics I'd love to see in the MR library: John Clare, George Darley, Walter Savage Landor, Thomas De Quincey and Dorothy Wordsworth (whose journals I prefer infinitely to the poems they inspired by her brother William).