"All of the punctuation has been stolen from the final chapter of Ulysses. Probably about five hundred assorted full stops, commas, apostrophes and colons." He paused for a moment. "Vern, weren't you doing some work on this?"

"Indeed," replied the squire, stepping forward and opening a notebook, "we noticed the theft two days ago. To take so much punctuation in one hit initially sounds audacious, but perhaps the thief thought no one would notice as most readers never get that far into Ulysses — you will recall the theft of chapter sixty-two from Moby-Dick, where no one noticed? Well, this theft was noted, but initial reports show that readers are regarding the lack of punctuation as not a cataclysmic error but the mark of a great genius, so we've got some breathing space."

Related Materials

References

Fforde, Jasper. The Well of Lost Plots. Penguin, 2003.


14 November 2008