If only we had the right office supplies . . .

In Great Russell Street he lingered outside the windows of bookshops,stationers and small publishers. The stationers particularly fascinated him. He coveted the files, punches, staplers, erasers, coloured inks, and gadgets whose functions remained a teasing mystery, thinking that if only he could afford to equip himself with all this apparatus his thesis would write itself: he would be automated.

David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965), p. 78