Have you tried the new Instagram option of following a particular hashtag?
I recently started following the hashtag #WillaCather. I’ve come across a few interesting review posts and far too many posts that use a corrupted Cather quote.
The corrupted quote is, “Where there is great love there are always wishes.” I don’t know where it came from, but what Cather actually wrote is: “Where there is great love there are always miracles.” It’s from Death Comes for the Archbishop.
In an effort to do my part to help right internet wrongs, I engaged with a few Instagrammers who have posted the corrupted quote. For the most part that was futile because, you know, they Googled that quote and it’s on the internet. It’s real. Oy vey.
I also stopped engaging because I didn’t want to look like a crazy old book lady. Apparently, it’s now too late for me to worry about that.
One of the coolest Cather things I’ve come across by following the #WillaCather hashtag is an American Authors Card Game that Kris Hopkins (@zipperenthusiast) posted.
Here’s a screen shot of the box:
How cool is this?
And Cather, most appropriately, graces the Queen cards. She might be the only woman in this deck.
This deck is by US Games Systems, Inc., © 1988. I went to their website and see that they still sell a version of this deck, but only Hemingway’s mug graces the cover and the five image slide show features only male writers.
I vaguely recall a deck of playing cards in my past that featured multiple authors, but I don’t think it focused on American writers and I don’t recall a Cather card.
Laura and I currently use a Jane Austen deck of cards.
Have you come across literary playing cards?
Update: I emailed US Game Systems, Inc. and here’s a complete list of the authors in this deck:
- HERMAN MELVILLE
- WALT WHITMAN
- HENRY JAMES
- THEODORE DREISER
- ROBERT FROST
- EUGENE O’NEILL
- F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
- WILLIAM FAULKNER
- JAMES BALDWIN
- THOMAS WOLFE
- JOHN STEINBECK
- WILLA CATHER
- ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Thanks for the Instagram tip! Along the lines of corrupt quotes, Rebecca Mead in My Life in Middlemarch tries to find evidence for the often quoted George Eliot line “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” She comes up empty! That quote is everywhere. It’s so hard to correct the record.
Oh, no! I have that George Eliot quote on a keychain and had no idea it wasn’t attributable to her. It’s kind of a funny to learn I’m guilty of the same literary “crime” as those I’m calling out in the post. Karma?
What’s scares me about your quest to right the Internet wrongs, is that *you have the proof of the BOOK the quote comes from*!! And yet…Google. Argh. Ack. Yikes. Phooey. What an uphill battle. To save your Soul you were smart to disengage…sigh.
I have a different deck of authors that I’ll have to flip through. I bought it because it had Austen on the front (of course) and I know the Brontës are all crammed onto one card and I’m pretty sure Woolf is in there, but women authors were woefully under-represented.
I’ll have to try the hashtag following, I haven’t yet.