Christopher Monson seeks the author of the truism, “The rectangle is the beginning of aesthetics.”

Dale Fink would welcome a verifiable source for words attributed to James Joyce at the time he became blind: “I can see a thousand worlds. I have lost but one of them.”

Jeffrey Williams hopes someone can identify the titles and authors of two stories used in an anthology that he recalls being distributed in the late 1970s by U.S. embassies as teaching material for English teachers abroad. “The first involves a father taking his daughter to an outing at an amusement park who loses her on the Ferris wheel; the second is a sort of science-fiction story involving an unhappy person who through lack of faith misses a trip to a better world.”

“a battered old book, bound in red buckram” (September-October). Roger Mills and Mark Stoeckle were the first to identify “Midnight Express,” a short story by English poet and author Alfred Noyes. First published in 1935 in This Week, the text appears in various anthologies, including August Derleth’s 1944 collection Sleep No More.

Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138.