COL49 - Chap 1: Who is Pierce Inverarity?

[Robin Landseadel]

On May 3, 2009, at 8:29 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> Does everyone have their copies of The Crying of Lot 49 handy?

Yessir!

http://www.innternet.de/~peter.patti/thomaspynchon-thecryingoflot49.htm

> 1.  There may be more editions of this than the other books, due to  
> its use in college lit survey courses (just guessing. Can anyone  
> confirm or deny this?).

Got my first copy of CoL49 out of the trash, a stripped copy of the  
Bantam edition featuring Oed dancing to the Paranoids in paisley  
patterns. 1979, Berkeley, plenty of used copies on the shelves of  
Textbook stores around the campus.

> 3.  What do we learn about Pierce Inverarity?  Pierce the  
> untruthfulness?  Get right to the point?  Inverarity's a Scottish  
> name, like Carnegie.  Pierce is something of a wannabe Robber Baron;  
> Jay Gould's bust hovers over him, threatening (or maybe it's only  
> Oedipa who's threatened by the robber baron image).

I detect plenty of Pynchon family history in all of TRP's books. The  
company that picked up Pynchon & Co. as it fell apart in the early  
thirties was E.A. Pierce.

http://tinyurl.com/cv7qpz

Those stamps could well be the tax stamps of brokerage houses.

"Inverarity" also points to "inverse rarity"

http://www.math.ucsd.edu/%7Ebenchow/Inverted_Jenny.jpg