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stimulant of choice of the résistants during the war. Sartre preferred Benzedrine or Corydrane…But whereas journalists would take a tablet or half-tablet to get them going, Sartre took four. Most people took them with water; Sartre crunched them. Besides Corydrane, Sartre smoked two packets of unfiltered Boyards a day and gulped litres of co V ee and tea. At night, he usually drank half a bottle of whisky be- fore taking four or five sleeping pills to knock himself out.’ All this has arisen apropos our mention of Carl Williams’s catalogue based on mind-altering substances. from christie’s comes the news that in their October 23 sale they are to o V er a picture created by algorithms. The giveaway clue to ‘Portrait of Edmond Bellamy’ is at the bottom right: This is, apparently, the first time that such a work will be auctioned anywhere in the world. Will the book be next in line to su V er such an indignity, we may ask ourselves? Those amongst us who read Mickey Spillane in our youth won’t need telling that best-selling authors (and their imitators) have been writing algorithmically for donkey’s years. Against a high estimate of £ 10,000 it actually sold for £ 273,420 (ham- mer price). in the bundobast department it may be a bit too feeble for some bibliophiles but to the rest of us it’s nothing less than drop-dead gor- geous. Only one recent book about books can fit that description: The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries by Massimo Listri, Georg Ruppelt and Elizabeth Sladek, 560pp published by Taschen with a price tag of £ 150. The first thing one can say on looking at any of these truly stunning photos is, Thank God for the book, and the second thing, Thank God for the thoughts that fill them. It would be cheap to draw any sort of comparison with micro-libraries (see p. 826). They are all of the same family and exist for the same purpose. mark samuels lasner , the renowned scholar-collector whose collection has been donated to the University of Delaware, and his partner Margaret Stetz, the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of
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