A handful of links – some older, some brand-new – from around the web:
Slate has put up an interactive, annotated on-line version of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”, for those of you who might want to read it. (My own attitude toward “Bartleby” is colored by the fact that I once had to teach it in a freshman English lit class, and the typical response to that story from the inevitable classroom wit is exactly what you think it would be.)
A cabinetmaker and scholar of historical furniture reports on a letter to the future found sealed away inside an 18th-century inlaid cabinet by the journeyman cabinetmaker who built the piece.
While I was trawling for other reasons through the archives of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, I found this post wherein all the Nebula-winning novels from 1965 through 2004 are summarized in haiku.
And, finally, there’s Jim Macdonald having fun again over at his blog.
Dr. Doyle's Blog 
The cabinet one sounds really interesting but the link goes to the salon Bartleby article.
Oh, dear. Thanks for spotting that; it should be fixed now.
Thanks! That was well worth reading. I went to Wurzburg recently and it’s right in the middle of huge tracts of farmland – for them to have been so short of food things must have been really dire.