Humphrey Appleby Jr. would appear to work in academic administration:
"You can't ignore rankings, because you're in a market. If you're going to organise things along market lines then consumers have to have information about products. The fact that the information isn't worth the paper it's printed on doesn't matter."
Let no one say the book reviews in this Journal are anything other than scrupulously objective. (I live alone in a fifth-floor apartment on Calle Belgrano, in Buenos Aires.) Butterworths' Modern Law of Patents has 1921 numbered pages, of which 915 make up the appendices. (One evening a few months ago, I heard a knock at my door.) The front matter runs to an additional ccxxxvi (236) pages. (I opened it and a stranger stepped in.) It weighs 1.48 kg and is 4.5 cm thick. (Everything about him spoke of honest poverty: he was dressed in grey and carried a grey valise.) Comparable figures for the current (16th) edition of Terrell on Patents are 1206 numbered pages (of which 494 pages is statutory materials; there are also civx pages of front matter). Its weight is 1.86 kg and it is 6.8 cm thick.
The rationale? 'The Modern Law of Patents may not quite be as all-encompassing as Borges' Book of Sand, nor does it even contain the equivalent of 900,000 volumes, but it is remarkably close to being a library in one volume...'
There's even a footnote adding that great minds think alike.
