When Hearn admitted he was a vegetarian, the unworldly Gardner went out and got his guest a pizza, but returned with the pizza box under his arm. One visit led to an invitation from Gardner’s wife, Charlotte, to stay for dinner. Hearn’s extended essay provides an unforgettable glimpse of Gardner’s home life in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., where he lived with his family during the period he was writing the “Mathematical Games” column for Scientific American. Matrix in Oz” by Michael Patrick Hearn, the compiler of The Annotated Wizard of Oz. The most substantive pieces in A Bouquet for the Gardener are “Editing Martin” by Robert Weil, Gardner’s editor at W.W. After all, the Queen of Hearts is practically defined by her shouts of “Off with his head!” No doubt there’s a rich history of this form of execution, particularly during Tudor times, but the reader must look elsewhere for such information. It then suddenly struck me that there’s no annotation for death by beheading. Somewhere in this tribute volume someone comments that Gardner avoided annotating anything unpleasant, such as Carroll’s social snobbery. On rereading Gardner’s notes, I was struck by how scrupulous he is in crediting the contributions of others, many of them members of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, as I learned from concurrently reading A Bouquet for the Gardener: Martin Gardner Remembered, a collection of mostly brief appreciations published by the LCSNA in 2011.
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