Quote: I shall lose no time in reading it: antedating (1871) (Gladstone 1897) (Disraeli 1898)

[Garson O'Toole]

What a wonderful quote, and thank you very much for your compliment on
my research.

There is an interesting looking match in Google Books to a close
variant of this Groucho quote. It may be an error and you may have
already ruled it out, but it looks plausible.

The match occurs in a humor magazine called Judge (also called The
Judge), volume 97, page number 117. The Google date is 1929 which is
the same year that the book “Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge” was released,
and the extracted text indicates that the match occurs within a review
of  the Perelman’s book that may be contemporaneous with publication.

Probing the volume with the number 97 reveals a September 14, 1929
date. The Yale Orbis catalog indicates that Volume 97 of Judge is
available in one of the Yale libraries. The entry for the Volume 97
reads “v.97:no.2503(1929:Oct.19)” This is more support for the year
1929 but the month is uncertain.

The matching volume is in snippet view and the snippet is defective.
It does not show the target text. Judge was published between 1881 and
1947 according to Wikipedia. So if there is a genuine match anywhere
in the periodical then it will be an advance.

Here is an abbreviated version of the text I extracted:

It's called "Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge." The pieces are pleasingly
short, and as screamingly cockeyed as an insane asylum on a Roman
holiday. …  If Groucho Marx wrote he'd write like Perelman, and if
Perelman acted he'd probably be terrible. Groucho's said of the book:
"From the moment I picked it up until I put it down I was convulsed
with laughter. Some day I intend reading it." Anyway it's a darned
funny book, and we're doing our best logrolling for dear old Perelman,
pal of our cradle days and great enemy of Puff that he is. … Ted Shane

http://books.google.com/books?id=J-BMAAAAMAAJ&q=convulsed#search_anchor

Interestingly, the quotation does not say that the Groucho quote
appeared on the book jacket.

I hope this is useful to you. If you decide that it is worth checking
on paper, or if you are able to rule it out please let me (the list)
know. Thanks.

Garson


On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 6:51 PM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       victor steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Quote: I shall lose no time in reading it: antedating (1871)
>              (Gladstone 1897) (Disraeli 1898)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This does not improve the date, but gets one very close to it: Life,
> Feb 9, 1962. http://bit.ly/aR3g5N
>
> The LATimes obit from 1979 also mentioned it, as did many subsequent
> publications. Oddly enough, there seems to be a gap between those two
> that's not easy to fill.
>
> I hope Garson can do better (of course, the results may be
> proportional to the amount of time I spent on this)
>
> VS-)
>
> On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 5:00 PM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Garson,
>>
>> Thanks for this splendid research.  Maybe you would be interested in the similar quote, "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter.  Some day I intend reading it."  This is said to have been a blurb by Groucho Marx on the dust jacket for S. J. Perelman, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge (1929).  In my research for the Yale Book of Quotations, the earliest record I found of this was in Show Magazine, Nov. 1961.  Can you (or any other ADS-Ler) find earlier evidence than that?
>>
>> Fred Shapiro
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org