Most “forgotten” books are forgotten for a reason, Stefan Beck writes. They’re bad. “Rehabilitating a ‘forgotten’ writer is a trickier matter. The point of publishing a book is to sell it, and books that people want to read tend not to disappear. There are exceptions to this rule. Charles Portis’s novels, for instance, fell out of print a while until the journalist Ron Rosenbaum successfully [pleaded] the case for their brilliance. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), by John Rollin Ridge, is no such exception. If you’ve never heard of it, rest assured that there’s a very good reason for that.”
Serious pun: “The best puns have more to do with philosophy than with being funny. Playing with words is playing with ideas, and a likeness between two different terms suggests a likeness between their referents, too. Puns are therefore not mere linguistic coincidences but evidence and expression of a hidden connection—between mind and material, ideas and things, knowing and nomenclature.”
