... just gearing up to do the edit on Luca Antara. And, have received from the publishers the schedule. My next obligation, by the 30th of this month, is to supply them with a book list to go in the back. We discussed this briefly last year but I hadn't done anything about it because it seems like a task best accomplished as the editor and I trawl through the manuscript. But there are complications. LA, the book, is to some extent a book about other books. It begins in an antiquarian bookshop and the external travels it maps are echoed and reiterated in accounts of the internal travelling that is reading. When a book comes up in the text, I've included, bracketed, the date and place of publication, viz: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (New York, 1942). However, not all the books encountered along the way are germane to the story, insofar as there is a story, while others are intrinsic to it. What to do ... I don't want to elide the (New York, 1942)s because I like the way they act as pause points in a fairly dense text and also because I think they help orient the reader to my reading; but it seems redundant to list them all again in the back. Maybe, I thought the other day, what I should do is provide, rather than a simple bibliography, a discussion of sources? And, having thought that, I suddenly felt excited at the prospect. I love those kinds of appendices to books and I'm really looking forward now to writing one. That will mean LA will have a subtitle, an author's note, a table of contents, three epigraphs and then, following, a discussion of sources ... more and more its starting to resemble one of those 19th century travel chronicles I used to read so many of, a form I always wanted at once to emulate and undermine.