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‘Whys and Wherefores’ by Martin Gardner, University of Chicago Press,
pp 261, 15.95 pounds

MARTIN Gardner contributed the mathematical games column in that respected
publication, Scientific American, for twenty-five years. Gardner also wrote
a book called The Annotated Alice, in which Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
is examined and every remark, thought, or event in it is solemnly explained
or discussed in small print alongside the relevant passage. Examples are
necessary. Alice falls down a well after entering the rabbit hole. The walls
of the well are shelves. She takes a jar of orange marmalade from one, but
it is empty, so she puts it back on another as she falls. Alongside this,
Gardner writes, ‘Carroll was aware, of course, that in a normal state of
free fall, Alice could neither drop the jar (it would remain suspended in
front of her) nor replace it on a shelf (her speed would be too great).’
And so on. In the poem, ‘You are old, Father William’, there is a line which
runs, ‘By the use of this ointment – one shilling the box.’ Aside by Gardner,
‘In the original version of this poem . . . the price of the ointment is
five shillings.’

In my opinion this is not only clapping the Muse in chains, but also
nailing the chains to the wall and when I found that the book started off
by doing the same thing to one of the greatest poems in the English language,
Coleridge’s The Lay of the Ancient Mariner, I despaired. I think it is what
is meant by ‘literary criticism’ mentioned in the brief notes about the
author. So I skipped most of these clumping parts of the book – there aren’t
many – and got on to more rewarding stuff in later essays and reviews.

The rewards are certainly in the sections dealing with puzzles and riddles.
You may find yourself laughing. I did at the list of variations of replies
in old jokes. ‘Who was that ladle I saw you with last night? That was no
ladle, that was my knife.’ There are good things, too, in the second part
of the book, a collection of Gardner’s published reviews; the long discussion
of mathematical prodigies and on theoretical physics in particular. But
I have reservations about the value of reprinting reviews (and even more
about reviewing books of reviews). No doubt, dipping into this collection
will almost always produce something interesting. Best sampled on a train
journey, I reckon.