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GDR | 3/16/20

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Background on the Guide to Daily Reading. Yesterday’s Daily Reading (w/bullet points!!) here.

Wallace Irvin, born yesterday in the year 1876. Reading: “The Servant Problem.” But see below.

[I had the same question. Why not something about good ol’ Julius Caesar yesterday? I mean, it’s not like nothing has ever been written about the Ideas of March.]

Decisons. Decisions. After 10 minutes or so of Duckduckgoing various combinations of his name and the title of the reading, and searching at all of my favorite go-to joints, I got nothing. Should I leave it at that? Noooo! It’s been a while since I’ve come across a rabbit hole such as this, so let’s get started, shall we?

Here is Wallace Irwin’s page at that infallible source. In Wikiland, he was born in 1875. In 1925, when my edition of The Guide to Reading: The Pocket University Volume XXIII ( Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickinson et al., eds.) was published, Irwin was born in 1876.

I did not know there was such a huge literature on the servant problem. Everyone and his brother has an essay with that title. See for yourselves.

Which brings me to this. In the GDR calendar, the title is “The Servant Problemb.” Is that a typo? A setto (as in type setting error)? It’s not a scano as I have the actual crappy old book laying here on my desk.

For those interested, a scano could be a typo, but it’s usually an error that results when the scan of a crappy old text, or the scan-to-text (can’t remember the technical term) tran8cr1pt1on 1ntroduce8 an error. See how that works? It’s quite an interesting and time intensive process that moves a crappy old book from the crappy old book state to the digitized crappy old book state. Be appreciative. Most of it is automated, but in the end it must be read by three layers of proof-readers. Real people looking for scanos.

I would have thought a setto, but then I saw some of the titles of his other works. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Jr. caught my attention. So maybe it’s not a problemb at all. Who knows?

AH HA!!!!

I said out loud while sitting at the table that contains all of the crappy old book about crappy old books
Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature. Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. The H.W. Wilson Company, New York. 1956. First published 1942.
Twentieth Century Authors First Supplement: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature. Stanley J. Kunitz. The H.W. Wilson Company, New York. 1963. First published 1955.

No mention of The Servant Problemb. I did find The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Jr. rather funny.

Stay well and enjoy reading!