I wish to thank the 50 individuals (or institutions) who bought a copy of my book on the large sieve last year! I’ll be happy to offer a beer (or any other drink) to any one of you who happens to spend some time in Zürich — even if this was an impulse buy due to its brush with literary celebrity, or a wish to see how the contents stacked up against such competition as Baboon Metaphysics.
Note: no need to bring a receipt to get the drink; I’m a trusting person. (Though there will be an interesting pigeon-hole problem once I’ve paid for 60 or 70 drinks…)
Irrelevant note: the happy few is a reference en anglais dans le texte to the quotation at the end of Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (one of my favorite French novels); I’ve just done my second Wikipedia edit by removing the claim that he used it for Le rouge et le noir (in the English entry).
