The Minerva Press brand was officially retired in 1820, but its reputation, influence, and significance as an avatar of literary excess persisted long past that end-point. Not only did its erstwhile publisher, A. K. Newman, continue a robust publishing business under his own name in the same premises for more than a decade, but derogatory references to the Press in popular media continued to rise in the decade following its demise. The epilogue begins with an account of the last two Minerva novels, belatedly published in 1821, and traces the press’s influence from them through its reputation in the 1830s and 1840s, concluding with a discussion of the fate of these countless works, long unwanted by copyright libraries, and an account of the publisher Henry Colburn, whose large-scale publishing business attracted many of the same criticisms in the 1820s and 1830s as Lane and Newman’s had done at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The epilogue concludes in the present day, examining recent reappearances of the Minerva Press in historical romance novels and exploring the affinities between popular fiction then and now.

The analysis and translation of extreme texts, or highly constrained texts, such as acronyms, anagrams, lipograms, pangrams, plays on words, and puns but also poems, lyrics, and even novels, are not just useful teaching practices that can allow students to improve their linguistic competence, both in their native and foreign languages. These activities have a fundamental pedagogical and political value. In training translators, ‘talk-and-chalk’ lectures should be replaced by collaborative workshops, attended not only by teachers and students but also by experts and actors in the editorial productive chain (professional translators, editors, publishers, and clients).