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Books: Which Side Were You On?	Books: Academics in Aspic
Off the Shelf	Chapter & Verse
Music: Alone at Last	Open Book: A Fusillade at Harvard

Patrick Henry is looking for the source of the line "A man is what he does with his attention."

David Goodman would like to identify the source of the phrase "numb to rapture and despair."

Judith Harris seeks the author of the quotation "If they give you lined paper, write the other way."

Rosemary Abbott asks where to find the Greek epigram "The doctor, knowing his friend would be crippled, decided to operate."

"in the deathless days, before she died" (March-April 1992). Anthony Shipps identified this quotation from "Change," a sonnet by William Dean Howells published in his Stops of Various Quills (1895).

"Oh land of lakes..." (July-August 1996). Olden Paris sent the lyrics to a junior high school song celebrating Washington State's semicentennial. It begins "Oh land of lakes and azure streams a-flowing/ Whose woods of larch and pine are green alway...." Joan Rhee mailed English lyrics by Amy Sherman Bridgman beginning "On great lone hills where tempests brood and gather."

"Right was right, and wrong was wrong" (March-April). Judith Rich Harris was the first to identify this quotation from Dorothy Parker's poem "The Veteran," published in her 1926 volume Enough Rope, and reprinted in the Viking Portable Library's 1944 collection, Dorothy Parker.

"flame Baltic of Hell" (March-April). Dan Gregory noted that Harold Beaver's 1986 annotated edition of Moby-Dick indicates that Melville's phrase is original but the imagery is indebted to Dante and Milton. Beaver also cites Robert Pearse Gillies's 1826 work, Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean (which predates Moby-Dick) as stating "Those who have noticed, in old editions of Dante, the representation of one of Satan's claws, projecting from a lake of brimstone, will best conceive the effect this vision of a whale's tail produces."

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