A Midsummer Restoration; or, twenty-three degrees from the ivory buckle of the Winter Solstice

[ron_drummond]

Working on finalizing Little, Big on Summer Solstice Eve, I had occasion to double-check a textual reference in "Pictured Heavens", the final scene of 3.1, which took me back to the original typescript of the novel, the version first submitted to Bantam Books in 1979 or '80. A handwritten emendation elsewhere on the page I consulted caught my eye,

Comments

[purple_mark]

Nice to have discovered these literary treasures, especially at the last moment.

[jenlev]

Fabulous! And this gives me an opportunity to cheer you and thank you all for the hard work on this project.

[kalimac]

That's fascinating, and also disturbing, because it had been missed for so long. A thorough review of the entire original manuscript for any other such instances seems called for, but it may be too late for that.

A few similar cases, though none of them were that long, of wordings omitted by accident from The Lord of the Rings, usually dropped unnoticed when the manuscript was typed, were discovered when the drafts were transcribed for publication in the 1980s, and were finally added to the text in 2004.

[holyoutlaw]

Very astute work, Ron!

[joculum]

I am, needless to say, delighted, but even more so as a connoisseur of coincidence: it was on the same day, if not perhaps the same night, that I came across my copy of an old issue of Art and Antiques with Hugh Kenner's column on "Joseph Wright of Derby's Orrery" and was reading with reflective fascination Kenner's perceptive comments on the illuminated faces of the children and the child who is only a dark silhouette (whose shadow side we see from our perspective outside the light shed by the orrery).

By the way, apologies to you and to Mr. Crowley for the pointless appropriation of Little, Big in the whimsical but conceptually pointed directions to my forthcoming exhibition on Edgewood.