I scanned a leaf particu- larly and saw that it was a palimpsest . Under the old dim writing of the Yankee historian appeared traces of a penmanship which was older and dimmer still -- Latin words and sentences: fragments from old monk- ish legends, evidently.

Beloved by one, a sort of instinctive and savage half-man, for its beauty, for its stature, for the harmonies which emanated from its magnificent ensemble; beloved by the other, a learned and passionate imagination, for its myth, for the sense which it contains, for the symbolism scattered beneath the sculptures of its front,--like the first text underneath the second in a palimpsest ,--in a word, for the enigma which it is eternally propounding to the understanding.

His mirror of vision was silver-clear, a flashing, dazzling palimpsest of imagery.

Holmes and I sat together in silence all the evening, he engaged with a powerful lens deciphering the remains of the original inscription upon a palimpsest , I deep in a recent treatise upon surgery. "Well, Watson, it's as well we have not to turn out to-night," said Holmes, laying aside his lens and rolling up the palimpsest . "I've done enough for one sitting. "It will be harder to read now than that palimpsest . Well, well, it can't be helped.

The contributors to this issue partake in Professor Shoukri's conviction that to appreciate the contemporary, gazing at it is not enough: you need to think of texts in their palimpsest quality and read what has been erased or covered in the process of innovating.

Turtle Island, and other original names, exist as a palimpsest for the myth and reality of contemporary Canada.

While Palimpsest may be one of the most direct beneficiaries from the Potter phenomenon, Scots book shops and the retail trade have been benefiting from JK Rowling's magical creations ever since they first took off seven years ago.

Ellison ultimately arrives at the form of the palimpsest : a synchronous conflation or superimposition of multiple historical periods upon the present.

And when I was asked in 1989 (by which time I'd become good friends with Etel and her publisher partner Simone Fattal) to write the back-cover blurb for the American-English edition of Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse, I found myself in the presence of an immensely important work--a tapestry (for Etel is also a great creator of tapestries and in this work has transferred many of the intricacies of weaving to the written word), as well as a contemporary palimpsest , in the sense that the verbal constructions are punctuated throughout with both pictographic and hieroglyphic forms, amid images of militant thrusts, cries, gasps, stutters, abruptions and burning suns.