"GL2" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol09)

those interested in literary curiosities.

Note to the Second Edition.

Mr. W. W. Wormald of the School of Bibliopoly, and Mr.
D. N. Borrow of the Institute of Occidental Languages, found
their curiosity aroused by the published extracts, and asked Mr.
Green for permission to examine the manuscript of the Papers.
They have now sent in a joint report, which raises some
interesting points.
'Paper of this kind,' they write, 'is, of course, very difficult to
trace or to date. The sheets submitted to us are of a poor quality
much inferior to the paper now in general use for such purposes.
Without venturing on a definite opinion, we record our sus-

picion that these sheets are much older than the dates of the
supposed meetings of the Club, perhaps 40 to 50 years older,
belonging, that is, to the period during or just after the Six
Years' War. This suspicion is supported by various items of
internal evidence, notably the idiom of the dialogues, which is
old-fashioned and does not represent with any fidelity the
colloquial language either of the nineteen-eighties or of the
present time. We conclude, then, that The Notion Club Papers
were written sixty years ago, or more.
'It remains, nonetheless, on this hypothesis a puzzling fact
that the Great Explosion of 1975 is referred to, and even more
precisely, the Great Storm, which actually occurred on the night
of Thursday, June 12th, 1987;(1) though certain inaccuracies
appear in the account given of the progress and effects of the
latter event. Mr. Green has proposed to us a curious explana-
tion of this difficulty, evidently suggested to him by the contents
of the Papers: the future events were, he thinks, "foreseen". In
our opinion a less romantic but more probable solution is this:
the paper is part of a stock purchased by a man resident in
Oxford about 1940. He used the paper for his minutes (whether
fictitious or founded on fact), but he did not use all his stock.
Much later (after 1987) he copied out his matter again, using up
the old paper; and though he did not make any general revision,
he moved the dates forward and inserted the genuine references
to the Explosion and the Storm.'
Mr. Green rejoins: 'This is one of the most fantastic "prob-
able solutions" I have yet met, quite apart from the unlikelihood
of an inferior paper being stored for about fifty years and then
used for the same purpose again. The writer was not, I think, a
very young man; but the handwriting is certainly not that of an
old man. Yet if the writer was not young in 1940, he must have
been old, very old, in 2000. For it is to that date, not to 1987,
that we must look. There is a point that has escaped the notice
of Messrs. Wormald and Borrow: the old house, no. 100
Banbury Road, the last private dwelling house in that block,