Welcome to the insane and rarified world of Professor Dr Dr
Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld of the Institute of Romance Philology. Von
Igelfeld is engaged in a never-ending quest to win the respect he feels
certain he is due--a quest that has a tendency to go hilariously
astray.
This time Professor Dr Dr von Igelfeld will have to take on a dangerous
newcomer--Deputy Librarian Dr Hilda Schreiber-Ziegler. Swept in on a
wave of progressive enthusiasm, she seems determined to drag the
department into the modern age. At first this is a minor nuisance, but
when Dr Schreiber-Ziegler attempts to remove twenty-one of the
twenty-two copies of Professor Dr Dr von Igelfeld's seminal work, the
thousand-page Portuguese Irregular Verbs . . . Well, things have gone
a bit too far. As a result, von Igelfeld mounts a campaign for the
exalted position of director of the Institute against none other than
the upstart Dr Schreiber-Ziegler herself. But the politicking will have
to wait; von Igelfeld has been offered a visiting fellowship among the
ivory towers of Oxford, where he will have to stave off an MI6
recruitment attempt and the effusive attention of a young American
scholar. Still, von Igelfeld has always heeded the clarion call of duty,
especially when it comes with a larger office.
