Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers, by W. A. Clouston (1890). A series of somewhat scholarly but enjoyably readable essays on Arabic and other folklore.
Bill and I have talked about this book before. As I was post-processing it, I became intrigued by the references and notes to other works of stories and folklore — so much so that I’m trying to find (in a totally non-systematic way) the books that are mentioned so I can provide them to Project Gutenberg. Up next for DP is A Group of Eastern Romances, and then later The Bakhtyār Nāma.
Go check it out, and you can read more jokes (and other stories, of course) like this:
A man went to a professional scribe and asked him to write a letter for him. The scribe said that he had a pain in his foot. “A pain in your foot!” echoed the man. “I don’t want to send you to any place that you should make such an excuse.” “Very true,” said the scribe; “but, whenever I write a letter for any one, I am always sent for to read it, because no one else can make it out.”
2 comments ↓
For the purposes of the Project Gutenberg catalog, do you know anything else about the author W. A. Clouston?
Pointing towards some reference which contains birth and/or death dates would be particularly welcome…
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
I recently found a paper on Clouston (Gareth Whittaker, “William Alexander Clouston (1843-96), Folklorist: Introduction and Bibliography,” Folklore 115 (December 2004) p. 348-362.)
He was born 1843 in the Orkneys, lived most of his life in Glasgow, and died 23 October 1896.
And that’s about all I know.