Gists, Orts, Shards II: Addendum & Postludes for A Commonplace Book

As Robert Richardson Jr. said of Thoreau, quoting what Augustine is reported to have remarked of Varro (one of the many delightful discoveries awaiting in this new volume), we can truly say of Jonathan Greene that he read so much that it was a marvel he ever had time to write anything, and wrote so much that it was difficult to see how he found time to read. Except with Greene we must add his prolific output as a designer and publisher of books as well! We can all be grateful once more for Greene's broad and perceptive reading, for this companion volume to his Gists, Orts, Shards: A Commonplace Book offers another installment of essential thought and marvelous wit distilled from the world's literature, joined here with excepts from Greene's own literary notebooks. Readers of the original volume know the treat they have in store, while those discovering Greene's gift for "reading with a pen" for the first time are apt to find that they see literature, and life, in a new way after this introduction. "A commonplace book is a collection of remarkable quotations. To deserve publication, such a book should be more than an abbreviation of its compiler's reading history: through selection and arrangment, it should set up impossible conversations, exchanges between great minds who never met. It should lay out agreements and disagreements, similar conclusions reached in different circumstances - or vice versa. The connections, like spiderwebs, may be obvious or nearly invisible. Greene's book is testimony to a mind ripened by a lifetime of reading - but it's also a fascinating (and sometimes startling) symposium open to all." Robert West