Retelling drift
The annotated copy on the bench
Coincidence · 1973, as later told · London, a station bench
Petrovka
Ask who first wrote it down.
The story as it travels: Hopkins needed Feifer’s The Girl from Petrovka for a film. London bookshops failed him. On a station bench, a copy. Years later Feifer said he had lent his annotated copy and lost it. Hopkins’s copy was that copy.
Sourced
Until Hopkins or Feifer is quoted from a dated first-person page, this house keeps the grade low. Hand’s use is secondary. Trivia pages are leads, not proof.
The source chain may be the case.
Concordance
- The thing
- Anthony Hopkins, looking for George Feifer’s novel, finding a copy on a bench that was later said to be Feifer’s own annotated lost book.
- Seen
- The story circulates with a station, a film, annotations, a later meeting.
- Sourced
- David J. Hand uses it as a statistical example. IMDb trivia and later interviews retell it. Hopkins’s or Feifer’s earliest own pages are not yet on this desk.
- Miss
- Which station. Whether annotations were recognized at once. Who told whom first.
- One question remains
- How does a coincidence survive retelling?
