Authors' Names

 I have been looking at the websites of a couple of local bookstores, for there are still a few presents to buy. At least three of the authors I looked for were pushed well down the list by more prolific or more popular authors.

The historian of late antiquity Peter Brown shares a name with an illustrator. The latter Peter Brown is wholly or partly responsible for a couple of series, "A Creepy Pair of Underwear" and "Killer Robots" that apparently became very popular with the young. It is not impossible to find the historian's memoirs, or his biography of St. Augustine, but depending on the bookstore it can take some clicking. The first time I tried this, I had reached a Spanish translation of one of the killer robot series before I found a history.

Gordon Craig, who wrote excellent books on aspects of German history, suffers from the popularity of Edward Gordon Craig, an English actor and director. There is also a novel, Gordon Craig, Soldier of Fortune that you might encounter before you find any histories of Germany. It is fair to say that the search would have gone better had I supplied Craig's middle initial and searched for Gordon A. Craig.

If you are looking for a novel or work of criticism by W.M. Spackman, you will discover quite a few books, I suppose novels, by one Anne Spackman. At the store I last checked, I never found the Spackman I had in mind, the search trailing off to books with multiple authors, one having a given name starting with W, the other surnamed Spackman.

 One store efficiently offered several titles by the author I had in mind when I searched for Stuart Hampshire. The eight by the philosopher were unfortunately "not in stock at your store". The ninth title offered was lagniappe, thrown in to remind me of the chances of search, Filthy Hampshire Limericks; the Hampshire here was a county, not a surname. As I recall that also was not in stock at my store.