Lucifer is a damned fine fellow, and I hope he may win

Phillip Pullman wrote an Introduction for the 2008, Oxford University Press edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Pullman starts his Introduction as follows:

A correspondent once told me a story—which I've never been able to trace, and I don't know whether it's true—about a bibulous, semi-literate, ageing country squire two hundred years ago or more, sitting by his fireside listening to Paradise Lost being read aloud. He's never read it himself; he doesn't know the story at all; but as he sits there, perhaps with a pint of port at his side and with a gouty foot propped up on a stool, he finds himself transfixed.
  Suddenly he bangs the arm of his chair, and exclaims 'By God! I know not what the outcome may be, but this Lucifer is a damned fine fellow, and I hope he may win!'
  Which are my sentiments exactly.

Thinking that tracing this story to its source might be a good test for AI, I asked Google’s AI and ChatGPT. Google AI obviously had no idea, and offered up a mix of mild platitudes, plot summary and hallucinations; ChatGPT was somewhat similar, but identified Pullman as the source: it was unable to trace the story any further than Pullman. Having spent an afternoon doing what Pullman was unable to do in 2008, I now have some sympathy for Pullman, Google’s AI and ChatGPT.

Rather than recount in full, step-by-tedious-step process by which I clawed my way back through time, pre-dating one version of the story after another, I will present what I believe to be the first version of the story, and then summarise what seems to have happened to the story afterwards.

The story originates with a work of fiction, Realmah, by Sir Arthur Helps, which first appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1867–68, and was published by Macmillan, in 2 volumes, in 1868.

In Chapter 5 of Realmah (which appeared in December 1867), we get the following scene:

It fell to the lot of a very saintly, good man, to have to travel with [Lord] Thurlow, who was then Attorney General. A journey to the North was a serious thing in those times, and my saintly friend dreaded the long journey, with the blustering Attorney-General, who he was sure would utter many naughty words before they arrived at York.
  They had hardly left London before the good man remarked, "We shall have a long journey, Mr. Attorney, and so I thought I would bring some books to amuse us. I daresay it is a long time since you have read Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' Shall I read some of it to you? It will remind us of our younger days." (In those days men read great works; for there were not so many books of rubbishing fiction, to which the reading energies of the present day are directed.) "Oh, by all means!" said Thurlow, "I have not read a word of Milton for years."
  The good man began to read out his Milton: presently he came to the passage where Satan exclaims, "Better to reign in hell than serve in Heaven." Upon which Thurlow exclaimed, "A d—d fine fellow, and I hope he may win." My saintly friend in horror shut up his "Paradise Lost," and felt that it would be no good reading to the Attorney-General, if he was to be interrupted by such wicked expressions of sentiment.

The Lord Thurlow mentioned here is Edward Thurlow, 1st Baron Thurlow (1731–1806), was Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain for fourteen years and under four Prime Ministers (1778–83, 1783–92). In 1906, this “blustering Attorney-General” was accidently mis-identified as Lord Eldon, i.e.: John Scott, 1st Earl of Eldon (1751–1838), Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, 1801–6, 1807–27. Other changes to this story occurred in the most colourful lines attributed to Lords Thurlow / Eldon:

"A d—d fine fellow, and I hope he may win." (1867, 1869, 1871)
"D—d fine fellow! I hope he'll win!" (1878, 1884)
"A d—d fine fellow. I hope he may win." (1909)
"A damned fine fellow! I hope he will win." (1925)
"This is a fine fellow. I hope he'll win." (1933)
"A damned fine fellow. I hope he may win" (1984, 1988)

As you can see, the only stable parts here are "fine fellow"; "I hope"; and "win"—the ellipsis of "damned" making it impossible to search for, and the change from "Lord Thurlow" to "Lord Eldon" eliminating all the pre-1909 examples.

Returning to Pullman’s version of the story, it is clear that his characterisation of the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, being entertained in a post-chaise to York with a reading of Milton, as a "bibulous, semi-literate, ageing country squire … with a pint of port at his side and with a gouty foot propped up on a stool" is very wide of the mark.

Note also that Realmah is a utopian novel, set in a made-up prehistoric empire called ‘Sheviri,’ featuring detailed accounts of its government and religion. That is—much like Haywood’s Memoirs of Utopia—it related anecdotes about real British public figures in the form of "utopian" fiction.

Since Lord Thurlow died in 1806, and had last been Lord High Chancellor in 1792, this anecdote was generations old by 1867. It is possible that it was recorded earlier than 1867, but, if so, I haven’t been able to find it—yet. Based on this very unscientific test, it seems that we are still a long way from AI agents being able to duplicate the above research effort, and so we must be even further away from them being able to exceed our research efforts. When we reach the point when AI agents can exceed us, it is likely that many of the "bibulous, semi-literate, ageing country squires" of history, will be recognised as—as is the case with this one—a fiction, built upon a fiction.

The Scientific Silverfish and Moth Destroyer, ca. 1928

I recently bought the volume on the right above (The Works of Théophile Gautier), which is from the same series, and in the same binding, as the volume on the left (The Complete Romances of Voltaire … Eight Volumes in One). I have had the Voltaire since 1999, and regularly use its version of Candide in my teaching, and have long wanted more versions of Gautier's La Morte Amoureuse, since it is such an important and early representation of a female vampire, so I was very happy with this find.

The local bookshop that had the Gautier, had five more of these Walter Black volumes in the same soft leather bindings—Zola, Maupassant, Boccaccio, Balzac, and a Voltaire—but the prices were too high for me to buy any others, just for the sake of their matching bindings. Looking on eBay, I discovered someone else in Australia had nine volumes of this series (below), in the same bindings, for less than I paid for my Gautier (the listing is here), but I have so far resisted starting yet-another collection front.

Inside my Gautier, I found a card (above and below), which—at first glance—I took to be an abandoned bookmark. A closer look revealed that, although this may actually have been used as a bookmark, the purpose of the card was to "Scientifically Destroy" silverfish and moths.

As you can see above, the text reads:

THE SCIENTIFIC
SILVERFISH & MOTH DESTROYER.
—————
SIMPLY PLACE CARDS IN OR NEAR
ARTICLES TO BE PROTECTED.
—————
CONTENTS: 14 CARDS 1/- PER PACKET
DUGGAN'S 194 LIT. COLLINS ST. MELBOURNE, C.1.

The verso of the card has had some sort of insecticide painted onto it—you can see the brush strokes.

* * * * *

I was not surprised that I could find no record of these cards; but I was surprised that I was unable to find out anything very concrete about Duggan’s of Little Collins Street, Melbourne. This Facebook post suggests that Duggan’s might have been a 1940s dry-cleaning business, which was bought out by Fletcher Jones, the Australian "clothing manufacturer and retailer" (which shut down only in January of this year; "Fletcher Jones to Close All Stores After Nearly 100 Years in Australian Retail," 17 January 2026, online here).

If Duggan's was a dry cleaner, I suspect that these cards were intended to be slipped into the pockets of freshly dry-cleaned coats and trousers, rather than books. But it seems to have done a sterling job anyway: the Gautier remains in lovely condition.

The New Google Books Interface Sucks

I will now be using Internet Archive links, wherever possible, rather than Google Books links. Here is my "old man yelling at clouds" explanation of why (a 2002 meme that is now, probably, an indicator of age).

The new Google Books format has degraded (in my mind) their interface, with dynamic overlays that become opaque to hide basic information about an item containing a search "hit" as soon as it finishes loading, or as soon as you interact with a page in any way (mouse or keyboard strikes). Here are the three steps in pictures: page, clear overlay, opaque overlay:

NB the thin white "floating" status bar box, at lower left, shows "waiting" in the first image, "loading" in the second, and which has disappeared in the third. It still isn’t clear to me why Google Books pages sometimes turns opaque as soon as the page finishes loading, and at other times, only once you interact with the page. But it conveys no information in either scenario since, even in the latter case it becomes opaque if you try to screencap the book information (i.e., before you interact with the page in any other way). Want to see the top of a page, or a page number? Tough luck. Want to centre or enlarge a highlighted term? Lol! Everything except the overlay page, with its puny title-box, disappears.

The thus-hidden page, displaying actual, useful information (such as book title, author, date of publication etc.), can only be reached by shutting down the overlay with mouse busy-work—there is no keyboard shortcut for this. By disregarding a warning on this page—that "Classic Google Books will [soon?] be turned off"—it is possible (for now), with yet more mouse-work, to reach the Classic Google Books interface. I’ll explain why you might want to do this shortly.

The obscured underlying page, the parent page or under-page (?), of the new interface is, admittedly, a better-organised version of the "About this book" page of the Classic Google Books interface, which was also a click-through. However, the Classic Google Books landing pages, the pages reached via search hits, were much more informative, making it possible to more-quickly shut down useless search hits.

All that remains visible on the overlay of the new interface is the first twenty characters of the title: so, "British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books: Edited 1881-1889 by R ..., Volume 52" becomes "British Museum Catal…" (as above); "The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries, Volume 17" becomes "The Magazine of Am…"; and "Catalogue of the Private Library of Mr. George S. Davis" becomes "Catalogue of the Priv…"

The URLs reached via this new interface are also much longer than those in Classic Book Books. So, for instance, at their shortest (i.e., with search terms and other elements omitted), the URLs are

Old GB URL: https://books.google.com/books?id=rwJGAQAAMAAJ

New GB URL: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Catalogue_of_the_Private_Library_of_Mr_G/rwJGAQAAMAAJ

and for a specific page

Old GB URL: https://books.google.com/books?id=rwJGAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA49

New GB URL: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Catalogue_of_the_Private_Library_of_Mr_G/rwJGAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA49

It is unclear who benefits from the longer URLs: an AI crawler only needs "rwJGAQAAMAAJ" and a human gains little (in anything) from "Catalogue_of_the_Private_Library_of_Mr_G"—not least, since many browsers hide full URLs anyway, and those few that display URLs would be unable to display a full URL which has not had search terms and other elements omitted, as I have above. Personally, since I compose these posts in HTML, I find it a lot easier to read and write with the shorter, simpler Classic URLs. A Classic URL, with its 12-character ID (**), is also a lot more satisfactory for scholarship (i.e., in print), when referring to an online reproduction of a book, since it is easier for the writer and publisher to typeset/format and for the user to transcribe the URL and ID code.

So, while it is possible (for now, but it is unclear how much longer it will be possible) to click through from a Google Books search hit to the “Classic” interface, and from there, find the short URL and 12-character ID code for a book, and from that to generate a page-specific short URL, as above, doing so is now awkward and time-consuming; and since—given the warning—there is no guarantee that these short URLs will continue to work once "Classic Google Books [is] turned off," I will use the Internet Archive where I can, even for items on Google Books..

(**) Not alphanumeric: Google Books uses alphanumeric characters plus underscores, but excluding other special characters, these being "word characters" (apparently).

Book Shop, Place of Worship

I was browsing for bookshops in Blackburn (Melbourne), when I spotted this:

(you have to imagine the "record scratch" sound-effect here): Did I read that right?!

Sweet! For comparison, here is the nearest "real" bookshop

So, what is a "Place of Worship"? Well, it turns out that it is not a Christian church, Jewish synagogue, Buddhist temple, Hindu mandir or Shinto shrine, each of which have their own symbols on Google Maps, nor (according to the post here) is it a Sikh gurdwara, Jain temple, Japanese Buddhist temple, or—in all liklihood—a pagan temple. It seems that this symbol…

…first appeared on Google Maps at the same time that the star-and-crescent symbol dissapeared, to (checks notes) "promote inclusivity" and to "avoid favouring one religion over another." I am guessing that this is also reason why there is no street number for this Place of Worship, and that Google Maps has deleted all post-2008 street-view data for one end of this street.

All of which is a shame, since I'd like to see any Book Shop that could accurately be described as a Place of Worship, and I have nothing but respect for any faith that so well captures my own sentiments in relation to book shops and book shopping. I'll have to resist the urge to visit this location to see the book shop for myself, in case I end up in a Nineteen Eighty-Four / Total Recall-type situation after Google remotely deletes the relevant data from my head.

On Buying More Books Than You Can Read

The following quotation from A. Edward Newton's "The Decay of the Bookshop"—which first appeared in The Atlantic (January 1920): 48 (here), and was reprinted in Newton's A Magnificent Farce (1921), 78 (here)—has a long and interesting history:

And so it is that, not being a scholar or altogether indigent, I do not much use any library except my own. I early formed the habit of buying books, and, thank God, I have never lost it. Authors living and dead—dead, for the most part—afford me my greatest enjoyment, and it is my pleasure to buy more books than I can read. Who was it who said, ‘I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul’s reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish’? Whoever it was, I agree with him ….
     Too many of us who are liberal, not to say lavish, in our household expenses, seem to regard the purchase of books as an almost not-to-be-permitted extravagance. We buy piano-players and talking machines, and we mortgage our houses to get an automobile, but when it comes to a book, we exhaust every resource before parting with our money.

The answer to Newton's rhetorical question ("Who was it who said?") seems to have been William Hobart Royce (1878–1963), an American writer and bookseller who wrote under the name "Penmore"; specifically, Newton had in mind the following quotation (from 1916)

I do hold the buying of more books than one could peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul’s reaching toward infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish — Penmore.

Newton's 1920 paraphrase of Penmore-Royce was expanded by Holbrook Jackson (in The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930), 225) as follows:

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired by passionate devotion to them produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity, and that this passion is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish, an argument which some have used in defence of the giddy raptures invoked by wine.

Here, Newton's words are indicated by italics. (Throughout Jackson’s Anatomy of Bibliomania, quotations are printed in italic, instead of within quotation marks.) More than fifty years later, a version of the Jackson's quotation appeared in Otto Bettmann, in The Delights of reading: quotes, notes [and] anecdotes (1987), 49 [here]. Bettmann paraphrased Jackson, but attributed the entire paraphrase to Newton:

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity… we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.
     A. Edward Newton

The passage following the ellipsis in the above quotation ("… we cherish books even if unread […]") appears to have been added Bettmann; certainly, it is not anywhere in either Newton (1920 or 1921) or Jackson (1930). Bettmann's embellished "quotation" is everywhere on the internet.

* * * * *

A 2008 blog post by Steve Dodson (here) unraveled the Newton-Jackson connection, and the lack of a source for the passage following the ellipsis. In a 2017 comment on this blog post, Dan Goldman identified "Penmore" as Newton's source, which he found in the Monthly Bulletin of the Pasadena Public Library "for October of 1915 or 1916." ( This source is viewable only as a "Snippet" to me in Australia.)

Since nearly a decade has passed since Goldman searched for the quotation, I thought I might now be able to find an earlier appearance, and therefore find the full context for the quote.

What I discovered is that the quote only appears as a "pull-quote" (a brief, attention-catching quotation used as a graphic feature): there is no "full context." I also cannot locate a primary source for the quote—but the earliest precisely-datable instance of its use that I was able to find appears to be in Educational Foundations: A Monthly Magazine of Pedagogy, vol. 27, no. 5 (January 1916), 279 [here]. The Penmore-Royce pull-quote is used as an advertisement, in the third of five advertisements for a "Book Buyer's League" that are scattered across this volume (September 1915–June 1916); the fifth advertisement (here) explains:

NOTE — Our friends are asked to remember that the publishers of Educational Foundations have exceptional facilities for filling orders for all magazines and books. The Book Buyer's League is now offering 10 per cent discount on all monthly statements to its members. Membership in the League costs but $2.00 a year and includes a subscription to this magazine.

The first bookish pull-quote (which appears on p. 275) is followed by "See Book Buyer's League announcement, this issue"; the second pull-quote (279) is followed by "Join the Book Buyer's League"; and the third pull-quote reads, in full:

I do hold the buying of more books than one could peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul's reaching toward infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish — Penmore.
     The Book Buyer's League is at your service.

Although I found references to "The Book Buyer's League" dating back to 1902 (Life, Vol 39, no. 1008 (20 February 1902), [np] here), I did not find an earlier example of this Penmore-Royce pull-quote. The Monthly Bulletin of the Pasadena Public Library example given by Goldman appears in a group of quotations, and the other examples I was able to find from 1916 were in the form of quotations too (such as this one here and this one here).

* * * * *

In 2026, it seems that it is still not possible to identify a source for Bettmann's peroration "we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance." Along with Newton's "it is my pleasure to buy more books than I can read"— Bettmann's "we cherish books even if unread" is a key source for the Wikipedia entry on Tsundoku, which is a pre-WW1 era Japanese word, meaning something like "to pile up [books] with intent to read" (1995) or "piling up books and leaving them unread around your house" (2015).

While I did not find the source for Bettmann's peroration, I did find the following 1905 quote on cherishing books:

There are books we like, and books we love; books we honour, and books we cherish; books we admire upon the shelves, and books we thrust beneath our pillow when we go to sleep.

This is part of a monologue by Henry Woolford, a character in Guy Berton's novel, Art Thou The Man? (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1905), 202 (here), which echoes Francis Bacon's famous adage, from his essay "On Studies" (1598)

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

The Woolford monologue is lengthy, but I liked this part of it, so I will close off this post by quoting it in full:

"I've wondered often why some books are favourite books," he said. "Of course, I know why they are, and yet there is a pleasant mystery about it all. There are many books here, and many more down in the library—great books, nearly all of them— books of the masters, histories of the great ones, symbols of thoughts that have lived through the ages undenied. And yet they have no equality in our affections. We pass by one with a glance, and seize upon another. There are books we like, and books we love; books we honour, and books we cherish; books we admire upon the shelves, and books we thrust beneath our pillow when we go to sleep. Some one has said that we have ancestors of the intellect as well as ancestors of the body, and a lineage of the spirit as clearly marked as a family tree. Here are my other ancestors—here in my favourite books. I've kept them here because I could not bear to have them banished in the library downstairs. They have watched me at my work, they have kept wakeful through the long, long nights, and they have been close when I slept. And they have been tyrants, too, for they have kept me awake oftener than they have talked me to sleep. Pleasant, precious comrades, these."