It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favorite books. This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors). For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books. Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists. If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).
Today, to kick off our holiday book bonanza is author Simon Winchester. Winchester studied geology at Oxford and has written for Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian, and National Geographic. He is the author of A Crack in the Edge of the World, Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, The Professor and the Madman, The Fracture Zone, Outposts, Korea, among many other titles. He lives in Massachusetts and in the Western Isles of Scotland.
I am a printer, a weekend amateur, and for good rollicking fun I spend a great deal of time setting type by hand. It is a contemplative calling that, among other things, offers very visible proof of many eternal verities about our language – one of the most obvious being what we all know to be true, but rarely think about: that the letter ‘e’ is by far the most common in the making of our words.
There it sits in the job-case – a great box of little lead ‘e’s, front and center, far outstripping in number and volume any of the other twenty-five letters, and placed in the case just so, because your hand will reach into that particular box time and time again as you set your copy in the composing stick.
It is difficult to think of writing without such a symbol to hand (though that last sentence happens not to sport a single ‘e’). It can be an amusing diversion of time – and a good way of falling asleep, if you can’t – to try to recast famous lines from l