Volume 48, Number 6 · April 12, 2001
Un-British Activities
By Robert Darnton
William Lawler made a most unlikely literary policeman. He was a librarian, a learned librarian, who looked out on the teeming city of Calcutta from the perspective of Roman antiquity and Victorian morality. Before him, spread out on a table, lay a huge sheet of paper divided into sixteen columns. Around him, above and below him, were books, piled on floors, crammed on shelves, a huge harvest of books published in Bengal in the year 1879. Lawler's job was to fill in the columns.
Feature, 6785 words
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