Wednesday, January 07, 2009

and the murderer is....is.....arrrgggghhhh

Forgot to mention another slightly odd connection with an earlier book - my copy of Lolita has a page (page 264, since you ask) missing - not completely physically missing as per Bluesman, but just blank where there should be print. It's pretty obvious since the previous page ends in the middle of a sentence. It happens to be a pretty vital page, as it's the one that contains the text of Lolita's letter to Humbert telling him of her current circumstances and asking for money; his visit to her in her new home precipitates his final pursuit and killing of Clare Quilty.

Luckily we are living in the future, so I was able to find a couple of internet resources containing the full text of the novel. This one is all nicely formatted as per the physical book, but it's not immediately obvious how (or if) copy-and-paste operations work, so I grabbed the relevant section of text from this one. A short bit of resizing and reformatting in Word, an appropriately scaled printout and a bit of wrangling with a pair of scissors and a Pritt-Stick later and - hey presto....


....you can't see the join, as Eric Morecambe used to say.

2 comments:

Andy said...

Why didn't you just nip down the library and rip out the pages you needed from their copy?

Just like this guy

electrichalibut said...

You know, I thought of that, or at least using the library's photocopier to copy the relevant page. The internet-based solution had the advantage of being possible to achieve without getting out of my chair, though.