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)
In his Illustrated London News essay for 7/27/07 (collected as "On Political Secrecy" in All Things Considered [1908]), Chesterton asserts that "Mystery stories are very popular, especially when sold at sixpence." According to William L. DeAndrea, giving the Oxford English Dictionary as his source, this was the first use of the phrase "Mystery Story" in print. [Andrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, Prentice Hall, 1994, p. 62.] We note, in passing, that the OED also mistakenly credits Chesterton as the first, in 1911, to use "vamp" ("seductress") in public print.
