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The Fine Art of Abridgement

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From: The Washington Post
Date: 19880807
Author:Vic Sussman

CANADIAN HUMORIST Stephen Leacock once wrote an essay about the popularity of so-called condensed books. Leacock thought it a marvelous idea, this boiling down of literature to its essential elements. Busy people could zip through abridgments shorn of extraneous material like character development, nuance and mood. Just the facts, Ma'am.

But Leacock felt scissors-wielding abridgers hadn't gone far enough. Rather than merely slicing and dicing, why not totally reduce an author's collected works so we could gulp literature down like multivitamins? Leacock suggested, for example, that all of ...

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