Dear Don,

With a few italics I would like to suggest another approach to SK's bookshelf:


“I glanced too, at the books; they were numerous, untidy, and miscellaneous. But one shelf was a little neater than the rest and here I noted the following sequence which for a moment seemed to form a vague musical phrase, oddly familiar: Hamlet, La morte d'Arthur, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, South Wind, The Lady with the Dog, Madame Bovary, The Invisible Man, Le Temps Retrouvé, Anglo-Persian Dictionary, The Author of Trixie, Alice in Wonderland, Ulysses, About Buying a Horse, King Lear....

The melody gave a small gasp and faded.”



I don't seem to have a copy of RLSK around, and I haven't read it since high school but  it does look like this may be a musical riddle of some kind. The New Grove Dictionary (and probably the Newest as well) has an article on the history of musical cryptography (CRYPTOGRAPHY, Musical) that may hold the key. I suspect the solution is on the spines rather than between the covers... Does anyone know the musical gamut in Russian? Could Mozart i Salieri have anything to do with it?

Carolyn