H. Holt Promotion

[Stanley Kozikowski]

The catalogue blurb from HH readeth as followeth:

MASON &
DIXON

  "Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the 
British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between 
Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line.  
Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated 
eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, 
ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major 
caffeine abuse.  We follow the mismatch'd pair--one rollicking, the other 
depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-romantic--from their first journey 
together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, 
through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, 
on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe 
and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented to them 
by the Age of Reason."

Does anyone detect the timely hand of TP in this obviously blatant piece 
of non-promotion?  What Condorcetted American would want to read such
matter?

More data:  The text is 61/8 x 91/4 at 704pp.
            ISBN # 0-8050-3758-6
             $27.50
            The cruellist month

Expect a 200,000-copy first printing and "National Television and Print 
Advertising" along with a "National Laydown Date" (ready?)


Stan
Engl/Humn
Bryant Coll
(401) 232-6151
skozikow at acad.bryant.edu