As editor and later publisher of the Peterborough Examiner, Robertson Davies published witty, curmudgeonly, mischievous, and fiercely individualistic columns under the name of his alter ego, Samuel Marchbanks. In 1985, Davies edited and selected from his alter ego's observations to bring together previous titles in the Marchbanks bibliography: The Diary (1947), The Table Talk (1949), and Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack (1967).

Marchbanks opines on politics, on his furnace, on theatre, on the taxman, on trains, on Christmas, on book-banners, on manners, indeed on everything under the sun. Not only this, but Davies's copious and quite delectable Notes are "calculated to remove all Difficulties caused by the passage of Time and to offer the Wisdom, not to speak of Whimsicality, of this astonishing man to the Modern Public, in the most convenient form."

"This writing of four decades ago is consistently incisive, insulting, funny, relevant and altogether interesting."--The New York Times

"Now this crank of the first order is on full display for the first time in America . . . To explain to his younger American readers such arcana as 'telegrams' and 'coal-burning furnaces, ' Davies has added graceful and comic notes that rival the entertaining opinions of Marchbanks himself."--South Florida Sun-Sentinel