Little Books and Huge Noses

 The excellent Public Domain Review, a rich source of curious stories and images, has branched out into publishing books – small books, my favourite kind. I now have the first three of these PDR Press Minis, and lovely little volumes they are, each with a usefully informative Note on the Text (more like an Introduction really). Number one in the series is a safe bet: Overture, from Swann's Way – the opening section of the first novel of the sequence, in Scott Moncrieff's translation (justly praised in the Note on the Text for 'finding an English music for the capacious and serpentine lines of the French original').
  The second title is A Dictionary of Victorian Slang and Phrase, which is extracted from Passing English of the Victorian Era by J. Redding Ware, first published in 1909. As well as the Note on the Text, this one includes the author's Preface, which begins 'Here is a numerically weak collection of instances of "Passing English". It may be hoped that there are errors on every page, and also that no entry is "quite too dull"...' Browsing in its pages, I discovered, among other things, that 'Made in Germany' meant, in the 1890s and after, 'Bad, valueless. Outcome of the vast quantity of inferior goods imported from Germany' – how times change... I also came across the word 'Dook', meaning 'a huge nose', in reference to the Duke of Wellington's magnificent hooter. A note appended to this entry, 'See Boko', leads to a word that I remember was still in use in the comics of my boyhood. It means the same thing as 'dook', and is, I learned, a corruption of 'beaucoup'. Ware elucidates: 'Said to be descended from the time of Grimaldi, who would observe while "joey-ing", C'Est Beaucoup and tap his nose. The phrase still remains, Anglicised, for a rough observing to another rough of a third gentleman's nose will make the statement, "I say – boko!" When one Espinosa, a French dancer, came to London (1858), the size of his wonderful nose drew so much gallery observation of "boko" that Mr J. Oxenford, in The Times, especially referred to the organ and assumed it was art. Thereupon, Espinosa wrote explaining that the nose in question was un don de la nature.' I fancy there's a lot more good browsing in store...
  As for the third title, this is Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched & The Finding of the Absolute by May Sinclair, an author, literary patron and modernist critic, of whom I knew nothing, though she was the first to use the phrase 'stream of consciousness' in a literary context. The two stories are the first and last in Sinclair's collection of Uncanny Stories, and I have yet to read them. I'm looking forward to it.