Editorial September 2006

THE VICTORIAN BRANCH of the Society has a nice tradition of annual dinners and interesting after-dinner speakers. I am grateful to Richard Overell, the Victorian Editor, for providing the text of last year’s after-dinner speech by Anthony Marshall, the erudite proprietor of the well-known Alice’s Bookshop in Melbourne. His topic, as befits an after-dinner speech, is both unusual and entertaining. Mr Marshall has done impressive research on the mustache in literature—famous authors who had mustaches (most of them men), and well-known literary characters with mustaches.