Fritz Bogott

February 6, 2008

I bought a copy of Karel Capek’s “Nine Fairy Tales & One More Thrown in for Good Measure” in 1990 and immediately carried it on board an overnight train– but I never actually read it until this evening. Both the text and the illustrations (by Karel’s brother Josef) seem eerily similar to something you might have come up with. If someone had handed me an unattributed copy of the story “How the Famous Sidney Hall Captured the Magician,” I would have bet a potato-turnip duck-fat latke that no one but you could have written it. I presume many others have pointed out this resemblance? Is Sidney Hall in fact Osgood Sigerson?

I know almost nothing about Karel Capek, except he was probably a better writer than I am, and may have invented the word, ""robot."" So, yes.