“If I live till I am 80 years old,” Charles Darwin wrote to a friend in November 1837, “I shall not cease to marvel at finding myself an author.”
Recently he had received proofs of his first book and he could not stop admiring its crisp type and smooth paper. “Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle” read the spine, and below that VOL. III, and below that DARWIN. The third of three planned volumes by different authors, it was first to be completed. He disliked the minutiae of proofing pages. “If I attend to sense,” he complained, “I forget the spelling and vice versa.”
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