I got a copy of the Airmont classic paperback of Tristram Shandy back when I was still in high school, mostly because of references in James P. Blaylock’s books. I found it at Yesterday’s Warehouse, and its condition was poor: the pages very yellowed, the cover speckled with brown age spots, and the spine a bit iffy for such a thick brick of a book. This made reading it problematical. It is a tale that jumps around and repays looking back and forth, and much handling would have almost surely destroyed the volume. But I had it on hand to look into (oh so gingerly) now and then, and to be a placeholder until I got my Norton Critical Edition, with the original illustrations and translated Latin.
It brings to my mind the DVD copy I bought of Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005). It stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as fictionalized versions of themselves, trying to make a movie of a constitutionally unfilmable book. Although it contains some bits that are key incidents from the novel which are fairly well done, I eventually sold it because it was too much 'modernity' and not enough Shandy. Thus, it goes into the select DVDs of the Shadow Library.
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