Previously in this series: Lines from John Banville’s Wikipedia Page I Wish Were About Me. The “Junior Heritage Club,” an old division of George Macy’s Heritage Press (1937-1982), used to issue beautiful little “Monthly Magazine” advertisements for special editions of various classics, with that wonderfully breathless and high-handed tone peculiar to early twentieth-century literary marketing. The 1939 advertisement for a hand-illustrated edition of Tennyson’s
Skillful and imaginative: more a Venn diagram than a syllogism: not all skillful draftsmen are imaginative, not all imaginative draftsmen are skillful; he's both. The gay euphemism: only if the sentence translates as "Robert Ball is a young American, who is gay", which seems wrong: you can't throw out the primary meaning, which is where he lives, info for some reason deemed crucial in publishers' blurbs ("with her two cats, Tabitha and Greenstar"); here you get a twofer, which maybe is the purpose of such details ("tasteful part of Connecticut: I will buy").
Skillful and imaginative: more a Venn diagram than a syllogism: not all skillful draftsmen are imaginative, not all imaginative draftsmen are skillful; he's both. The gay euphemism: only if the sentence translates as "Robert Ball is a young American, who is gay", which seems wrong: you can't throw out the primary meaning, which is where he lives, info for some reason deemed crucial in publishers' blurbs ("with her two cats, Tabitha and Greenstar"); here you get a twofer, which maybe is the purpose of such details ("tasteful part of Connecticut: I will buy").