The Powder of Sympathy: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Powder of Sympathy, credited to Christopher Morley, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Powder of Sympathy by Christopher Morley. Read in English by LibriVox Volunteers Another collection of mostly short “soliloquys” from Christopher Morley, an American literary luminary, who introduces them thus: “… these pieces were written, day by day, out of the pressure and hilarity and contention of the mind. I have made no attempt to conceal their ephemeral origin. They were almost all written for a newspaper, and contain many references to journalism. … it is remarkable that they should have been written at all: remarkable that any newspaper should take the pains to offer space to speculations of this sort. I have not scrupled, on occasion, to chaff some of the matters newspapers are supposed to hold sacred. … But a columnist … is only a deboshed Editorial Writer, a fallen angel abjected from the secure heaven of anonymity. … unsuspecting whether intended by his scheming employer as a decoy, or a doormat, or a gargoyle, or a lightning rod (how is he to know, never having been given instruction of any sort except to go ahead and write as he pleases?) … [T]he columnist pursues his task and gradually distils a philosophy of his own out of his duties. Oddly enough, instead of growing more cautious by reason of his exposure, he becomes almost dangerously candid. He knows that if he is wrong he will be set right the next morning by a stack of letters varying in number according to the nature of his indiscretion. - Summary by Winnifred Assmann and excerpts from the Preface Note: "The word ... niggardly [used in section 42, is] ... etymologically unrelated to the highly offensive and inflammatory racial slur euphemistically referred to as the N-word, despite the ... visual and auditory resemblance to it." Merriam-Webster

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Powder of Sympathy
• Author credits: Christopher Morley
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 43
• Listed recording duration: 8:02:44

Catalogue topics

• humor
• dogs
• New York
• writing
• journalism
• literary reviews

Opening tracks: first 24 of 43

1. 00 - Epigraph and Dedication — 7:24
2. 01 - An Oxford Symbol — 10:14
3. 02 - Scapegoats — 7:38
4. 03 - To a New Yorker a Hundred Years Hence — 6:12
5. 04 - A Call for the Author — 4:25
6. 05 - Mr. Pepys’s Christmases — 8:47
7. 06 - Children as Copy — 8:18
8. 07 - Hail, Kinsprit! — 3:56
9. 08 - Round Manhattan Island — 6:36
10. 09 - The Unknown Citizen — 6:42
11. 10 - Sir Kenelm Digby — 29:05
12. 11 - First Impressions of an Amiable Visitor — 6:21
13. 12 - In Honorem: Martha Washington — 5:54
14. 13 - According to Hoyle — 4:40
15. 14 - L. E. W. — 4:55
16. 15 - Our Extension Course — 5:36
17. 16 - Some Recipes — 6:34
18. 17 - Adventures of a Curricular Engineer — 7:13
19. 18 - Santayana in the Subway — 13:16
20. 19 - Madonna of the Taxis — 6:26
21. 20 - Matthew Arnold and Exodontia — 16:58
22. 21 - Dame Quickly and the Boilroaster — 9:52
23. 22 - Vacationing with De Quincey — 31:39
24. 23 - The Spanish Sultry — 7:21

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.