Some books seem to take a lifetime to appear.
This one actually did. A Horatian lifetime, to be precise. The study that began in 1935, inspired by the bimillenary anniversary of Horace's birth, has recently appeared in a series marking the same anniversary of Horace's death. That book, B. explains in his preface, fell victim to political revolution in 1937 and was lost in the shuffle of the Spanish civil war. The few copies that arrived at the author's doorstep he distributed among friends and sent off for review.