Notes to "In a movie theater at least you can hold hands."

* Another: Archie can be seen--if it's possible to conceive this--as a smart, competent Bertie Wooster, while Nero Wolfe could be seen as--again, if it can even be conceived--more confident Jeeves . . . who has turned the tables on Bertie and is, rightly, giving the damn orders himself. ** On this front Sue Grafton deserves to be celebrated. She published her first Kinsey Millhone novel, A is for Alibi, in 1982, and, as she's progressed through the alphabet in her titles, she's deliberately allowed time to get away from her, telling Sarah Weinman in 2009 that Z (is for . . .) would coincide with Kinsey's fortieth birthday in 1990. (Side note to a side note: I've long thought that the Marvel Universe--so incredibly innovative when it appeared fifty years ago--could have been even more amazing had it been able to figure out a way to allow its characters to age. Peter Parker reached his late twenties (maybe early thirties) and stopped; Reed Richards and Tony Stark their forties. Imagine a world where we were in the third or fourth generation of Marvel heroes, where Peter Parker was nearing seventy, Bruce Banner eighty--yet still Hulk-powered, Professor X long dead not through malice but age, Doctor Strange but a powerful memory to his legion of mentees . . . )

Notes to Best head buyer for the Invisible Library: Robert Bolano

* I've had to at least consider Walt Whitman for the title of Least Desirable Literature Professor. It would be sort of like studying combat--or, worse, willpower--with the Batman. What is he going to say, "Just do like I do"?

Notes to Round and round with Hardy and James

* A note to the volume points out that Stevenson mistakenly dated the letter 1891, for which James gently corrected him, writing to "My dear distant Louis" that he envied "my time-deluded islander" for being "so luxuriously 'out'."

** I'm looking at you, Stieg Larsson.

*** All these seem right to me except Conrad. Am I forgetting scenes of humor in Conrad? Lord knows, I've not read nearly all his books, but what comes to mind is a grim determination verging on dourness. Am I missing something?

Notes to "This is not so much the first over, as a gentle limbering up," or, Embarking on the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters

*Wait--there are published notebooks of Hardy? Yes, yes, it turns out that there are. I'll be getting those.

Notes to The story, the forest, the chain of transmission

* How pleasing that the man who--though in this paragraph simply credited with naming the wildwood--was one of the scientists who placed the forest's clearance much earlier than generally thought shares a name with Arthur Rackham, one of the greatest illustrators of the creatures of forest, fairie, and fantasy!

Notes to Chess

*Despite the fact that Dunnett lets the move-by-move narration go after four or five moves--which, as I had been sketching out the moves as they happened, super-nerd-style, disappointed me immensely--I have not a whit of doubt that she had, in her files somewhere, the log of the entire game. Meticulous doesn't even begin to describe Dunnett's approach to detail. God, I wish there were any other writer quite like her.

Notes to I know where to hide those ludes!, or, Place-based boredom

*The outer limits of conceivable eternity at that point being, say, the sixteen years (and scraggly mustache) to which your REO Speedwagon–t-shirted neighbor had attained.