The Great Cryptogram

 Second Story Books has the two volumes of Ignatius Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays and will sell them to you for $37.50. Together, they amount to 998 pages. The thought of all that print brings to mind the fellow in Wodehouse, one of the Mulliners perhaps, who tried to ingratiate himself with his beloved's eccentric aunt by reading up on the Baconian theory: for his trouble he found himself the audience of her long and bewildering explanation of some point, an explanation said to be unusually short and lucid for a Baconian's. It also reminds me what heroic reading Samuel Schoenbaum undertook when writing Shakespeare's Lives.