The full treatment

Waitrose still stock the TLS in their Epsom branch at least, so happening to be there to get some cherries, I fell for one. Not a bad number, with a fair amount on interest to me.

One of the items which caught my eye was a learned edition of the complete known writings of Evelyn Waugh, running to at least 30 volumes and including 12 volumes of what are called 'personal writings'. I used to read Waugh, a funny writer and, seemingly a funny if unpleasant man, but OUP must have time and money on their hands to be producing such an edition - which seems to me about as inappropriate as Pléiade giving the full treatment to Simenon, most of whose oeuvre is properly consumed in the form of lurid paperbacks. As it happens, another good writer who was an unpleasant man, not that that bears much on the question of whether he belongs under a fancy banner.

I wonder this morning who, apart from university libraries, is going to buy this Waugh edition. Maybe at some point in the future, OUP will do a deal with Amazon and it will appear on Kindle at a knockdown price, along with a lot of other collected works, mainly, it has to be said, from publishers one has never before heard of.

Then who still reads Waugh at all? Would I find much of him on the fiction shelves of Epsom Library? Who carea about the shenanigans of the fairly rich between the two world wars, apart from the producers of costume dramas for television? With Waugh being yet another writer who has moved from being an observer of the contemporary scene to a source of said dramas. More of past than present interest, yet another cog in the wheels of the heritage industry.

Checking with OUP, I was surprised to find that the home page of their web site (reference 2) had no search button. But guessing, I went to the academic and professional tab where there was, leading to the snap above.

PS 1: the cherries were sold in 350g packs, which seemed expensive, but were actually about the same as I had paid in the market a few days previously. Cherries were about the same too, that is to say very satisfactory. And they were English.

PS 2: looking idly for a book by Nabokov in Epsom Library the other day, I found two of his books, neither the right one. So present, but not in force. I dare say the catalogue would have turned up a good deal more, covering, as it does, the whole of Surrey.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioth%C3%A8que_de_la_Pl%C3%A9iade. Expensive, but printed on good quality, very thin paper. This means that they stay open at your page without needing to hold it down and that they are compact. I have a small number of them and use them very occasionally.

Reference 2: https://global.oup.com/?cc=gb.