Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine, I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full of Chesterton ancedotes. They were idiosyncratic, historical, and Chestertonian. He gave me permission to use them here. I hope y'all find them as interesting as I have over the years. Most of them have never been published.
Chesterton Short(s)
To describe his appearance, or the visible impression Gilbert Chesterton made, George Bernard Shaw was driven to compare him to Gulliver as seen by the Liliputians and to note his resemblance to Honore de Balzac. "He is our Quinbus Flestrin, the young Man Mountain," Shaw wrote, "a large, abounding, gigantically cherubic person who is not only large in body and mind beyond all decency, but seems to be growing larger as you look at him–swellin' wisibly as Tony Weller puts it." [Complete Prefaces, V. I, Penguin: 1993, p. 188.]
