Had anyone chosen to ponder further, he or she might have wondered at the strange symmetry of the two men’s settings—pinioned as each was among great stacks of books, single-mindedly devoted to learning of the most recondite kind, each man’s only outlet his correspondence, in great daily storms of paper and floods of ink.

Except there was a difference: William Minor remained profoundly and irreversibly mad.

—Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman