Detail from Arthur Rackham's illustration of Pan from The Wind in the Willows, which is in the British Library summer exhibition Writing Britain. Photograph: British Library
If you can't remember the bit in The Wind in the Willows when Mole and Rat go searching for a missing baby otter, only to find him asleep in the hooves of the muscular, horned god Pan, then you're not alone. "It is the chapter that everyone forgets about it," said Jamie Andrews of the British Library. "For most editions it's left out."Kenneth Grahame's handwritten version of the chapter, together with illustrations by Arthur Rackham, will though be part of a summer exhibition at the library called Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands, details of which were announced on Tuesday.
The chapter – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – is normally dropped because it jars, seems so strange compared to all the others and, to some, is vaguely homo-erotic. Grahame thought it essential.
The library said The Wind in the Willows would be one of more than 150 literary works to feature in a show that aims to explore how writers in Britain, from Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare to Angela Carter and Hanif Kureishi, have been inspired by and helped shape our understanding of landscape and place.
Full piece at The Guardian