I just like

[james_davis_nicoll]

Ngrams

Comments

[andrew barton (from livejournal.com)]

Personally, I'm more interested in the 0.0000000295% who were writing about a Hugo Award in 1950, three years before the first one was given.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I am less interested than you are, because I know how flaky the Google Books metadata can be, despite heroic attempts by the Ngram people to clean it up.

In this case, the 1950 mention of the Hugo is contributed by a Special Illustrated Edition of Sense and Sensibility, which also mentions many post-1950 novels of Philip K. Dick.

Here's the word-cloud, or what I like to call the "inchoate review:"

acquaintance admiration affection Allenham Anna Karenina appeared assure attention behaviour believe brother Chawton Colonel Brandon comfort cottage cried Marianne dare say daughter dear Delaford delight disappointment Edward Ferrars Elinor and Marianne engagement expected eyes fancy Fanny farther favour feelings felt friends girl give happy Harley Street hear heard heart hope immediately Jane Austen Jennings Jennings's John Dashwood kind knew Lady Middleton letter live look Lucy Lucy's ma'am manner Mansfield Park Marianne's marriage married mind Miss Dashwood Miss Steele Moby-Dick morning mother never Norland Northanger Abbey novel opinion pain Palmer party perhaps pleasure Pride and Prejudice replied Elinor returned Robert Ferrars Scanner Darkly seemed Sense and Sensibility silent Sir John sister smile soon speak spirits suppose sure surprise talk tell thing thought told town walked Wéeé’aw Chapter wife Willoughby wish woman wonder young

"Scanner Darkly" really shouldn't turn up as a phrase that Jane Austen mentions more frequently than the average author in English. Neither should "Moby-Dick," I think. Melville's novel was published after Austen had been dead for thirty-four years. The presence of Anna Karenina is also somewhat surprising.

Either the spacetime continuum is beginning to shred, or the metadata about the Special Illustrated Edition-- which, by the way, also discusses Edgar Rice Burroughs and L. Frank Baum at length-- is lying.

(As for "Wéeé’aw," investigation suggests that it results from an attempt to OCR a decorative clipart squiggle that Starbooks Classics likes to use at the beginning of chapters. The same investigation reveals impossible dates for a bunch of Starbooks Classics publications. Who are these people?)

[nelc.livejournal.com]

My first guess was that the spurious references were down to a specially written foreword to the special edition, but now I'm thinking that they OCRed the list of books "also published by" in the front or back of the edition.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Actually Sense and Sensibility contains lengthy discussions of the careers of these other writers. At least three pages on Melville, at least three on Burroughs, at least four on Philip K. "No Relation To Moby" Dick, at least two on Virginia Woolf, three on Tolstoy, three on L. Frank Baum, etc.

Large slabs of biographical and critical text about Austen appear to be lifted from Wikipedia and other public-domain sources. I can see an edition like this being useful as term-paper fodder.

Why a large number of Starbooks Classics editions wound up bearing bogus publication dates is a matter for speculation.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I would have guessed that the older Hugo would be more-frequently-mentioned, but they have approximate parity.