I was enchanted by the obituary of Robert Burchfield in the Times, which contained one paragraph that let you peek through the keyhole into worlds of unimaginable drudgery. The parentheses surrounding it were the visual equivalent of a pleasurable sniff.
(This miscalculation was small, though, compared with others such as that for The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, the 12 volumes of which appeared between 1937 and 2002, or Die Afrikaanse Woordeboek, the first instalment of which appeared in 1950, and which has now reached the letter “O”.)