Cocktail Talk: The Secret of the Bottle
I’m not always in the mood for an anthology, but sometimes it’s fun to bounce from author to author fairly rapidly instead of settling in with one person. While I don’t know (though I haven’t checked this assertion) that there are less anthology type books today, it feels like there are, and the difference between last century and now seems almost completely to come from the lack of Alfred Hitchcock collections. There used to be tons of these, all fairly reliable, and all with fun names and covers. The below sherry quote comes from one called Stories My Mother Never Told Me, specifically from a story by Gerald Kersh, who must have enjoyed sherry quite a bit.
‘Hold hard, my friend,’ I said in Spanish. But he only bowed low and made a graceful gesture toward the glass. I believe that that sherry was in the hogshead before Napoleon came to handgrips with the Duke of Willington at Badajoz. Sherry is the worst thing in the world for rheumatism, and I meant to take no more than one sip. But that one sip filled me so full of sunlight that I felt myself responding to it as if to Spanish music, and my appetite came roaring back.
–Gerald Kersh, The Secret of the Bottle
