Helpful Hand

Bookseller Eric Korn writes to the TLS:

Sir, – I should be sorry to see my improbable find lost through the intervention of an overzealous normalizing proofreader; the bibliography of film noir sources, which I reviewed, attributed the praise of Raymond Chandler not to our own dear mag, but to “The Time [sic] Literary Supplement”, which has an awesome plausibility in an alternate universe. Samuel Butler had a similar disappointment: his sardonic gag “tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all” (I wonder if I have this right) was corrected by a helpful hand.