Erasmus -- With Freckles

New York: Simon and Schuster. Near Fine in Very Good dj. 1963. First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [minor shelfwear to bottom edge of book, one-time owner's name and source annotation on ffep; jacket lightly soiled, a little tanned at spine, with a few small closed tears at top and bottom of front panel]. Comic novel about "an unorthodox poet and professor of poetry" whose self-created Utopia (on a ferryboat moored in San Francisco Bay, with his wife, his five chidren, and "a merry band of nymphs and bearded poet-disciples") is turned upside-down and inside-out when his eight-year-old son Erasmus (who plays the French horn and is utterly devoted to Brigitte Bardot, to whom he writes regular proposals of marriage) turns out to be a mathematical genius, "a human computer. IBM with freckles." The good professor, "holding fast against the Philistines" (which include the Bank of America, the Defense Department, IBM and the Russians, all of whom develop a keen interest in the capabilities of Erasmus's brain), is forced to leave his university post and take a job writing greeting cards; this and other developments add up to "total hilarity [it sez here] -- a triumph of spoof and satire." Filmed in 1965 under the title DEAR BRIGITTE, directed by Henry Koster, with Jimmy Stewart as the beleaguered professor and the great Billy Mumy as Erasmus. .