pumpkinstrokemarrow

Thought to read the first paragraph off the Kindle and came to the sentence end: 'he died before it amounted to a plum'. What on earth did this mean? Had the scanning come unstuck? I was vaguely reminded of the French custom of needing to put together a proper amount of land before one could call oneself a proper duke. However, apart from p for peerage or the cognate pairie this did not seem to fit, so got no further.

But not having transferred hard copy to Oxfam, I was able to see what it said, which was 'he died before it amounted to a Plum', with Plum end noted. The end note explained that Plum was mid 18th century slang for £100,000. All now makes perfect sense.

Which illustrates the weakness of scanning in, into a format which does not seem to support end notes. Even a capital P would have been a help, a warning that this Plum was not a regular plum, which might have sent me off to the OED, which did indeed list the meaning in question, without, as it happens, referring me back to my own snippet of text. Which weakness is not going to be much of a problem with most contemporary fiction which is where, I imagine, that Amazon look to make their dosh. Plus I believe that Kindle books from Amazon use a more sophisticated format than Kindle books from Gutenberg. Maybe their format does support end notes.

On the other hand, their version of the OED only lists three meaning for plum, not including the one that my version lists. But then I paid for my version, albeit second hand, ex Royal Guildford Grammar School (http://www.rgs-guildford.co.uk). Despite their fancy web site, they still needed to free up space in the library for something other than the OED. Furthermore, at the time their OED was purchased, they rode under different colours, being then known as 'King Edward VI's Grammar School'. I think it is the same place.

PS: as it happens, a recent TLS makes the point that books of this sort are plot rich and character development poor. Lots of chapters and lots of adventures but not too much in the way of tear jerking. This had to wait until the end of the century. Is there any need to read it at all? The lurid cover is quite encouraging.