Harry Gordon Johnson

"Harry Johnson was notorious in his lifetime as a living machine for producing economic literature: during a relatively short career of twenty-seven years, he produced over five hundred academic papers, one hundred and fifty book reviews, thirty-five books and pamphlets, and hundreds of newspaper articles, many of which were written on trains and aeroplanes; so prodigious was his output that articles by him continued to appear years after his death, conveying the uncanny impression that he was still hard at it in Heaven. Moreover, almost nothing he wrote was tossed off. On the contrary, the average quality of his output was astonishingly high, synthesising apparently unrelated contributions by others and restating previous results with a verve that made them stand out like new. But writing was only one of his many activities. He travelled ceaselessly to conferences around the world and lectured at universities up and down Europe, America, Africa and Asia. His frantic energy was fuelled by wood-carving and alcohol, producing the one while listening and consuming the other while writing."