Andrew Lang

The Disentanglers Andrew Lang

Publisher Marketing: THE DISENTANGLERS THE GREAT IDEA THE scene was a dusky shabby little room in Ryder Street. To such caves many repair whose days are passed, and whose food is consumed, in the clubs of the adjacent thoroughfare of co-operative palaces, Pall Mall. The furniture was battered and dingy the sofa on which Logan sprawled had a certain historic interest it was covered with cloth of horsehair, now seldom found by the amateur. A bookcase with glass doors held a crowd of books to which the amateur would at once have flown. They were in boards of faded blue, and the paper labels bore alluring names they were all First Editions of the most desirable kind. The bottles in the liqueur case were an- tique a coat of arms, not undistinguished, was in relief on the silver stoppers. But the liquors in the flasks were humble and conventional. Merton, the tenant of the rooms, was in a Zingari cricketing coat he occupied the arm-chair, while Logan, in evening dress, maintained a difficult equilibrium on the slippery sofa. Both men were of an age between twenty-five and twenty-nine, both were pleasant to the eye. Merton was, if anything, under the middle height fair, slim, and active. As a freshman he had coxed his College Eight, later he rowed Bow in that vessel. He had won the Hurdles, but been beaten by his Cambridge opponent he had taken a fair second in Greats, was believed to have been runner up for the Newdigate prize poem, and might have won other laurels, but that he was found to do the female parts very fairly in the dramatic performances of the University, a thing irreconcilable with study. His father was a rural dean. Mertons most obvious vice was a thirst for general information. I know it isawfully bad form to know anything, he had been heard to say, but everyone has his failings, and mine is occasionally useful. Logan was tall, dark, athletic and indolent. He was, in a way, the last of an historic Scottish family, and rather fond of discoursing on the ancestral traditions... Contributor Bio:  Lang, Andrew Andrew Lang (March, 31, 1844 - July 20, 1912) was a Scottish writer and literary critic who is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. Lang's academic interests extended beyond the literary and he was a noted contributor to the fields of anthropology, folklore, psychical research, history, and classic scholarship, as well as the inspiration for the University of St. Andrew's Andrew Lang Lectures. A prolific author, Lang published more than 100 works during his career, including twelve fairy books, in which he compiled folk and fairy tales from around the world. Lang's Lilac Fairy and Red Fairy books are credited with influencing J. R. R. Tolkien, who commented on the importance of fairy stories in the modern world in his 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture "On Fairy-Stories."