In a May 24 posting Jeff Edmunds correctly identifies William Caine's "The Author of Trixie" (1924) and Sir Francis Cowley Burnand's "About Buying a Horse" (1875) on Sebastian Knight's bookshelf, and adds: "One wonders what relevance these might have had for Sebastian Knight." I wonder too about
Burnand's book, unless its Victorian humor seems teeth-grindingly bad to Sebastian, but Caine's novel is a little masterpiece that all lovers of Nabokov should seek out. Wonderfully deft and wrily self-consciousness in a
way quite surprising for its time or at least (since this was, after all, post-_Ulysses_) for its time and tone. Once you read it, you'll see its comic relevance to Sebastian Knight, who could almost have written it