the off-color remarks a surviving speaker of Early Irish shared with him, he settles into a chair at Regensburg. Although he ventures as far afield as Italy and India, von Igelfeld remains as predictable in his habits and as impervious to the outside world as Kant. Supported by his colleagues, the unfortunately named Prof. Dr. Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer and Prof. Dr. Dr. (honoris causa) Florianus Prinzel, who looks like an athlete but isn’t, he plays tennis after spending an hour with a rulebook, recalls a foreshortened duel that ended with a foreshortened nose, attempts to disprove a xenophobic Sienese landlady’s claims that Germans eat too much, falls in love with his dentist, and turns himself radioactive. Trudging stoutly from one academic conference to the next, von Igelfeld recalls the great 19th-century comedies of minutiae inflated to monstrous proportions, though he’s less majestic than Mr. Pickwick and less fiercely stupid than Bouvard and Pécuchet. Perhaps the closest analogy is Mr. Pooter, the office drudge of George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, whose indulgently satiric tone Smith faithfully reproduces. Like these lovable antiheroes of the past, von Igelfeld remains a gentle figure who deserves every cartoon anvil that falls on his head but retains his dignity and goodness throughout. (Illus. throughout with b&w block prints) Dawn Drzal reviews the first three books, after they were issued in the US. She likens the stories to E. F. Benson's Lucia books. Drzal says the first book is a collection of short stories, not a short novel as labelled in the US. The stories are "gentle farces", creating a place "where much is made of nothing -- to great comic effect. The humor is heightened, of course, by the lofty formality with which the professors address one another, even as they're thinking the basest thoughts." The humor plays "many variations on von Igelfeld's unshakable belief in German superiority." Drzal considers the first three stories as unimportant, and sees a sharp improvement in the remaining five stories. She notes "McCall Smith's astounding level of productivity" in writing books, and will not be surprised if he exceeds P. G. Wodehouse's total, exceeding 100 books. (Most of the experts just say “about 100”" as to the number of novels that Wodehouse wrote.) At the release of the audio book, Library Journal Review referred to the book as "these sequential collections of stories". The "comic vignettes based