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…