The End of the World | Guide to Daily Reading 12/12/22

Nothing happened today, either, and I didn’t know whether or not to believe it. Two days in a row seemed like a stretch to me. So I checked. Gustave Flaubert, French novelist and author of Madame Bovary, born on this date in 1821.

Daily Reading:

The End of the World by Oliver Herford (bio below story)

Oliver Herford (2 December 1860 – 5 July 1935) was an Anglo-American writer, artist, and illustrator known for his pithy bon mots and skewed sense of humor.

From his obituary in The New York Times:

“His wit…was too original at first to go down with the very delectable highly respectable magazine editors of the Nineties. It was odd, unexpected, his own brand. It takes genius to write the best nonsense, which is often far more sensible than sense. Herford’s, the result of care and polish, looked unforced.…Intelligent, thoughtful, well-bred, what with his animals and his children and his artistic simplicities, he was remote from the style of the best moderns. No violence, no obscenity, not even obscurity or that long-windedness which is the signet of the illustrious writer of today. An old-fashioned gentleman, a painstaking artist, whose work had edge, grace and distinction.”

That Infallible Source
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