Instruction Manual

I’ve mentioned in passing my unwise purchase of a photographic enlarger. Specifically it is an LPL C6700, capable of enlarging from colour negatives as well as black and white ones; and able to handle 35mm and 120 film (up to 6x7) alike. It was far from cheap, setting me back something in the region of £700-800 in 2008 money. It was supplied without an enlarging lens – I afterwards bought not one but two of those as well. And I’ve used the thing three times.

Not only has it stood idle, but it’s an ungainly, bulky white elephant for which I don’t even have a suitable storage space. So it perches awkwardly on top of a chest of drawers, draped in its dust-cover (the one part of it that has served its purpose) as an on-going reminder of my occasional tendency to over-reach and get a bit carried away acquiring things I don’t end up using. The cover of the enlarger’s instruction manual, which I have dutifully retained, is shown above.

Eisbergfreistadt

As well as some regular decks of playing cards, I also have a more unusual pack, one in which the four suits are birds, chimneys, icebergs and weeds. The ‘King’ cards from the former two suits are pictured above, those of the latter pair below. These were devised as part of an elaborate art project called Eisbergfreistadt realised in 2006-07 by the American artists Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick. The conceit behind it was that of an iceberg drifting into the Baltic in 1923, running aground off the German port town of Lübeck, whereupon some of the the townspeople moved on to the ice, establishing a short-lived ‘free city’ there with its own laws and currency.

The ‘joker’ cards in the deck bear a rhyme alluding to this scenario, one of them in English, the other in German. Nicholas Kahn had contacted me in connection with my old weblog, and we had sporadically corresponded for a time after that. He very kindly sent me two packs of these cards (“one to use + one to give away” as he wrote in an accompanying note). There are some more images from the Eisbergfreistadt project here & here, and more images of the playing cards here.

Associates

An exception to my usual rule of only posting my own pictures, here’s something that just happened to catch my eye somewhere on-line a few years ago. It’s a scan of a page from some 1982 teen magazine, part of a fashion spread with a photo of the late Billy MacKenzie with one of his Associates, Martha Ladly. I’m not sure which magazine exactly. Sheila Rock is credited as the photographer.

Once in a while I’ll spend some time listening to MacKenzie’s singing and feel sad all over again he died so young. Prior to teaming up with him, Ladly had been a member of Martha and the Muffins – not the Martha who sang, but the Muffins' keyboardist who also happened to go by that name. MacKenzie is widely believed to be the subject of The Smiths' song ‘William, it was Really Nothing’. Ladly had a tenuous connection to another classic Manchester 7": on the label of the A-side of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is a dedication “For ML” from designer Peter Saville, her boyfriend at the time.

Download Codes

Will download code cards ever be prized by the ephemera collectors of tomorrow, I wonder? If so, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cards or slips from the earlier phase of the vinyl revival might be more highly-prized than later ones, as – in my limited experience at least - a little more care and attention seems to have been devoted to them then than now. Nowadays, if there’s a download code at all in a new record, it might be printed generically on a tiny slip of paper.

Above are scans – front and back – of an appealing example with a colourful design on one side, and all the necessary information on the other, to which has been added some mild flattery. “Why, yes, thank you, my taste is pretty good, isn’t it?” A plainer example from another self-titled album is shown below. In both cases I’ve edited out the actual codes.

More Stamps

Frequently ordering items from ebay one might sometimes recieve a parcel decorated with an assortment of old postage stamps. One such delivery came disconcertingly adorned with at least a dozen stamps commemorating the wedding of Charles & Diana – a mere forty or so years after the event itself. Last week there arrived a consignment of stationery whose postage had been paid for by the eight stamps shown above – one of them dating as far back as 1977.

Other recent arrivals in the post have included letters from the U.S. bearing the trio of stamps above, and, below, one from Russia with half-a-dozen stamps on it.

Blast

Above is a scan of a letterpress printing sample which incorporates phrases from Wyndham Lewis' Vorticist Manifesto, as expounded in the first of the two issues of BLAST magazine (1914). A friend with a long-standing interest in the various strands of modernism, and a specific fascination with Vorticism, had acquired his own late 19th century printing-press, which he set up in his garage. The sheet above is one of the several products of that press that have come my way. I’ve had a number of sets of letterheadings printed on it too, with, I hope, a new batch to come in the near future.

Specifically, the phrases above are from the 6th section of the first part of the Manifesto, which is on page 18 of the original magazine. Lewis was a man of many animosities, some of which seem to have softened over time – I’m not sure if his hostility toward the Victorian era & its artistic productions was among them.

Bookmarks

Above are five assorted bookmarks packed with books I’ve ordered on-line. From left to right:

• One of several Blackwell’s bookmarks I’ve accumulated.
• One with a Periodic Table of the Elements on it courtesy of The Book Depository, now defunct.
• A bookmark from the London Review Bookshop advising us to “Fill your brain with ideas, your bag with books, and your mouth with cake.”
• A bookmark from the famous Strand Books in New York (“18 Miles of Books”).
• One from Dark Rose Books whose tagline, on the reverse of the bookmark, is “Sourcing the best gothic books to satisfy your dark side.”

Postcard from Košice

The city of Košice in eastern Slovakia is one of the locales mentioned in Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH (mentioned in my previous post). Although it didn’t play any sigificant part in the story of “Operation Anthropoid”, Binet recounted how time he spent teaching there in the ’90s was a foundational influence on his becoming obsessed with the subject.

The postcard above was sent to me from Košice in 1989 by my then-flatmate who had gone for a week or two as part of a long-standing inter-university exchange programme. He had the good fortune to arrive at a heady moment when the ‘Velvet Revolution’ was gathering pace, joining with his hosts in some of the on-going mass demonstrations, and learning the phrase slobodné voľby teraz! (‘free elections now!'). His message on the card didn’t mention any of that, praising instead the virtues of Prazdroj, which I already knew and loved in its exported form as ‘Pilsner Urquell’.

Kursuus-sectâ

Twenty years ago, I learned of an exhibition that had been staged in Rotterdam in 1983 called Imaginaire Landen, which collected various artworks that mapped or described imaginary locales. Intrigued by some of the names of the artists and writers represented in the show, I ordered a copy of the exhibition catalogue. This, when it arrived, turned out to be a box containing numerous unbound leaflets printed in Dutch, along with sundry additional pieces of ephemera, among them a box of matches bearing the name of a non-existent airline (but with real matches inside); a weird card-game; a button-badge; numerous maps, blueprints, charts and tables; schematics of dreamt-up metro networks; a musical score; and even a little bag containing coarse black sand, some pebbles, and a broken cockle-shell, purportedly from the imaginary island of Atipé. Also there was the wine-label shown above.

The fictional location that produced the wine was one called Spokanië (or Spocania) an island-group ostensibly in the Atlantic to the south-west of Ireland: originally the brainchild of Rolandt Tweehuysen, a Dutch linguist. Given his line of work, it’s no surprise that the language of Spokaans (or Spocanian) is a significant part of his creation. According to wikipedia, it has a “a dictionary of over 25,000 entries” and is “one of the most elaborated artistic languages ever created”. Many other aspects of the islands and their inhabitants have also been described by Tweehuysen and others, with two books and an extensive old-school website devoted to the subject.

Back to the wine-label. From this page on the web-site (with the help of Google Translate), I’ve learned that it’s from the southern side of the Tjokky Mountains in the Neno district of the island of Tigof. It’s specifically a product of the Hogorit-Qualâ estate, and is a Kursuus-sectâ (or ‘blood wine’), a term used in that part of Spocania for light red wines akin to French Beaujolais or Burgundy. What kind of vintage might 1980 have been, I wonder?

Spare Stamps

When I send letters I like to adorn them with special-issue stamps, especially now the standard Royal Mail stamp designs are so remarkably ugly. Special issues come in sets, often with an assortment of denominations, some of which tend to be more readily-usable then others. With the passing of time and the consequent increases to postal rates, I’ve accumulated a variety of the less readily-usable ones which are still awaiting an opportunity for affixing to an envelope.

The examples pictured above are from the Pride set (2022); from Royal Navy Ships (‘19); Blackadder (‘23); Cats (‘22) The Gruffalo (‘19) and Rugby Union (‘21) respectively. Perhaps in time I’ll be in a position to make a decorative arrangement out of them all. Oddly, a couple of the letters I’ve sent recently have had their (Spice Girls, ‘24) stamps seemingly removed while in the mail. Has a ’90s pop fan taken an acquisitive shine to them? Did their adhesive somehow fail? The latest letter I received was likewise missing its stamp.

Stamtavla

A document that happened to come to hand the other day was my cat’s Stamtavla, that is to say his Pedigree (he was born in Sweden, and spent his first year and a half there). Before being renamed Murphy, he had originally been given the name “Adolfsbergs Big Me”. Adolfsberg is a place near Örebro; while ‘Big Me’ apparently derives from his tendency (still in evidence today), to want to be at the centre of attention.

The pedigree documents four generations of his ancestry in full, which is a good deal more detail than I have in my own genealogy. That probably goes some way toward explaining why one of us has often drawn spontaneous praise for his good looks, and one of us hasn’t. Had it been left up to me, I would have sooner adopted an unwanted stray, but my wife was dead-set on getting a Birman. hence all this paperwork.

His family tree contains a bewildering variety of inventive names, many of them utilising somewhat unidiomatic English, or otherwise mixing languages. His father, for instance, went by “Sun Mountain Gimme Love To Give”, while his maternal grandfather was “Centauri’s Autobahn”. A particular favourite name is that of his paternal grandfather’s paternal grandmother, “Ullstrumpans Qumquat”, Ullstrumpan being Swedish for ‘the woollen stocking’.

Fridge Poem

With Valentine’s Day just over, here’s a photo of a ‘fridge-poem’ I made for my wife. The fridge poetry “romance kit” may well have been a Valentine’s gift – I can’t recall. I do remember it lay unused for a year or two before I tried conjuring something appropriately romantic from its limited vocabulary; an undertaking that proved more difficult and time-consuming than I’d anticipated. Those thirty-two words were the result.

The ‘poem’ had been on the fridge for a few more years when I took the picture, hence its sub-optimal cleanliness. The photo was an aide-memoire so I’d more readily know how to replace the words on a new fridge in a different house after a move.

‘Endless’ and ‘forever’ are utterances – however sincerely expressed or deeply felt – that the passage of time will make a brusque mockery of. Within ten years of choosing those words, within five years of taking the picture, I was a widower.

Final Phonebook

A new copy of The Phone Book (for Newport and South East Wales) arrived here last month. At a mere 152 pages it’s a thin shadow of the telephone directories of yore. No-one would choose to rip this one in half as a feat of strength. I was going to include a scan of its cover in this post, but it’s unlovely enough that I’ll just link to it instead.

Not just another new copy, this is the very last one. The grim words “FINAL EDITION / Hold on to it forever” make that plain. I don’t imagine many will obey that instruction. Very few folk will have any practical use for it, and such utility as it holds will further fade with time. Even from the standpoint of historical interest, any Yellow Pages from the tail end of the last century will contain much more of value than this vestigial thing.

I recall in the later ’90s feeling vaguely perturbed that each new phone-book seemed thicker than the last, wondering where the ever-bulkier unwieldiness of each new edition could be leading. But then there came a point where new phone-books arrived alongside those AOL CDs offering free trials of dial-up internet access, which proved to be, alongside the simultaneous explosion in mobile phone use, the beginning of the end for them.

Without Let or Hindrance

Imagining I might spend the summer after my final year of University inter-railing around Europe, I ordered my first passport in the spring of 1990. A page from it is shown above. By the time it arrived, I knew that in no way could I afford not to spend the whole summer working. For quite some time it proved to be of no use to me at all. I’d travelled overseas exactly once during childhood – but hadn’t needed a passport of my own at that time. My next opportunity to leave the UK didn’t come until ‘93 – my first trip to Paris – so I finally got to brandish it then. It’s one of the old-style blue passports that pre-dated the burgundy EU common format ones that many Brexiteers so resented.

Travelling in Europe a fair amount in the later ’90s I did eventually get my money’s worth out of the thing. It also accompanied me on my first four trips to North America, with stamps on pages 5, 6 (x2) and 9 to mark those occasions. My second passport (2000-10), was also well-travelled; but the third (2013-23) I used only twice. With no forseeable prospect of further international journeys, I have yet to order passport #4.

The Ace of Spades, the Ace of Spades

Above are two Aces of Spades from old decks of playing cards I bought a couple of years ago. The first is from a De La Rue pack which dates back to the late ’50s (if the information on this page is accurate). It bears the company’s name and the text “Duty Three Pence”. It had once (before 1862) been a legal requirement in the UK for Aces of Spades to be marked thus, but in a 20th-Century pack this was just an affectation on the part of the manufacturer. The other card is from a more recent deck made by Piatnik in Austria.

Playing cards were a constant presence through my childhood: there would be games of Switch (akin to Crazy Eights) with my parents and my sister; and hands of Whist with my grandparents and Aunt. I’d play Patience (i.e. Solitaire) on my own to pass the time. At school there were games of Phat and Black Maria (which we coarsely called ‘Bitch’). In adulthood I played less, though my wife and I sometimes played Cribbage. Card games seem at risk of becoming a thing of the past: I wonder if smartphones, and the multitude of games they can contain, may risk pushing many classic games to extinction.

The title of this post, by the way, comes from the refrain of a well-known song.

Payment On Demand

The image above is another film still scanned from a set of mounted slides I acquired about a decade ago. On the slide the film’s title is given in German as Die Ehrgeizige (which, according to Google Translate, means ‘The Ambitious One’) whereas the original English title was Payment on Demand. It was a 1951 release directed by Curtis Bernhardt which starred Bette Davis.

The project’s working title had been The Story of a Divorce, but both the title and the ending were subject to last minute changes imposed by Howard Hughes. A poster for the movie showed a stylized depiction of Davis in an off-the-shoulder black dress with the line “I made him now I’ll break him”, while the theatrical trailer enticed audiences with “The One Sin No Woman Ever Forgives!… – Unleashes An Emotional Conflict… The Fury Of Which The Screen Has Never Known!”

Stamps

I’m grateful to my Canadian correspondent for sending a letter in an envelope (part of which is pictured above) decorated with a veritable gallery in the form of an artful arrangment of nine postage stamps.

My friends were striving for comedic rather than artistic effect when (many years and many addresses ago) they posted me a single leaf of paper with twenty 1p stamps affixed to it. I was suitably amused, but would understand if the postal worker who was obliged to frank them all might not have found it so funny.

How to Use and Enjoy Your Brother

On the shelf of a charity shop last weekend I spotted a small case with a recognizable shape that had further been wrapped in a plastic bag. On the bag was a sticker with the handwritten text “Brother typewriter”. The case had a satisfying heft, suggesting the machine within had a metal body, and there were no worrying rattles when I moved it. On inquiring about the price I was told £10, a small enough number that I didn’t mind taking a chance on it.

Happily, the case contained a 1973 Brother Deluxe 1300 Tabulator typewriter in excellent condition. It’s a fairly small and basic machine, but I very much like its snappy typing action. It came complete with its original eight-page instruction leaflet: “How to Use and Enjoy Your Brother® Portable Typewriter”. At the back of the leaflet, some pointers on how to learn to touch-type, concluding with the following advice: “Do not let errors discourage you. Strive as you practice to lessen the errors. The real question is: are you improving day by day? PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT.”

I’ve been using typewriters routinely now for at least eight years, and my typing is still full of mistakes. The real answer is: I am not improving day by day. Even so, I do not let that discourage me either.

Tapes

Among my latest vintage vinyl purchases, a copy of Johnny Cash’s 1964 LP Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. Judging by its inner sleeve it’s not a ’60s original but an early ’70s re-press. On one side of that sleeve (shown above) is some promotional matter informing the listener about a couple of new-fangled audio formats: the musicassette and the 8-track cartridge. “The size of a packet of cigarettes!” “Practically indestructible!” “Child’s play to operate!” On the reverse are listed a variety of CBS releases available on cassette, including Bridge Over Troubled Water, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, Abraxas and the soundtracks to The Graduate and Funny Girl.

Bitter Tears is a striking and interesting record. While at certain aspects of it (notably the cover photo), definitely wouldn’t pass muster today, the angry sentiments behind the songs are still regrettably valid. Not really quite enough of a Cash fan myself to hold on to it, I’ll be passing it on to my father.

Question

Shown above is Question 5 from the examination paper I was given in April 1990, for ‘Computing Science 3.27: Logic Programming’, part of the BSc(Eng) course I was taking at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, then affiliated with the University of London. That paper is one of four still in my possession all these years later: I think I might finally get around to throwing them away. It’s not like I did particularly well in these exams - I’d been on track for a 2:1 after my first two years, but had rather lost interest by the start of the third and final year, which, inconveniently, contributed 50% of the overall degree score. I ended up with a ‘Desmond’; a 2:2, which seemed to me a fair reflection of the work I’d put in to it.

I think the answer to the puzzle in part (b) of the question is Chris. My reasoning is as follows. We know from point (i) that three of the men are tall and one is short - so when we are told in point (iv) that Bart and Chris are the same height, they must surely both be tall. And as point (v) says Chris and Don are not both tall, that must mean Don is the short one. It also means that Don can’t be good-looking, as only one of the men has all three desired characteristics, and only one of the four is handsome. In point (iii) we see Alex and Bart have the same complexion, as must, we can deduce, Chris and Don, given that two of the men are dark and two pale. Returning to the proviso that each man must be at least tall or dark or handsome, it tells us that short & plain Don must be dark, therefore Chris can’t be pale; and hence he must also be the pretty boy.

How close I might have got to expressing the above in Prolog I do not recall. I had some familiarity with that language, which at no point appeared to catch on outside academia. At least mentioning it on my CV never did me any good. Indeed, there was regrettably little I could take from that degree as a whole which was of any use in my subsequent career as a software developer.

Broadleaf Books

Really good second-hand bookshops are a rare & endangered species nowadays. My favourite such establishment in this part of the world is Broadleaf Books in Abergavenny. Their stock is arranged in thematic sections, with the volumes in each section not necessarily following any obvious order. This frustrates systematic search, as it meanwhile rewards serendipitous discovery. With systematic search very easily done on-line, this seems to me an ideal state of affairs. I’m not in Abergavenny too often, but when I go, I seldom leave Broadleaf without making a purchase.

One of their bookmarks is shown above, resting in an open copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses (specifically a mid-’50s reprint of the Bodley Head edition), that I picked up on my last visit there. I’ve read Ulysses about 1¾ times: once while in university, and then again a decade later, if only up to some point in the middle of the so-called ‘Circe’ chapter. I’d then put my paperback copy into the seat pocket in front of me, whence I forgot to retrieve it on leaving the plane. I very much doubt I’ll make a third attempt at reading it from cover to cover, but there are some chapters I’ll be delighted to revisit.

Tickets Please

It was December 1997 and I really needed to go to the bank. The problem was that I had latterly moved back to the UK and the bank was in Italy, where I had been working and living for the previous two years. Some weeks after departing, my former employers had made a final payment into that Italian account, which I had no ready way to access. I had funds coming from my new job, but not soon enough. All that remained was a diminishing sliver of available credit.

These adverse circumstances were exacerbated by procrastination, and by an anxious aversion to just making some phone-calls to to try to seek alternative arrangements. I decided on a Saturday morning I’d go to Heathrow airport and get myself a standby ticket to Rome, failing to realise (as I learned when I got there), that all flights were full and in any case fares were right up at a seasonal peak I could in no way afford. After some blank panic, my wishful thinking returned: I’d take the train to Rome - that would be cheaper.

From Heathrow I took the tube into central London, making my way to Waterloo Station, in those days the terminus for the Eurostar service to Paris. A one-way ticket cost me £90. The train departed mid-afternoon, and deposited me at Paris Gare du Nord at half past eight in the evening. I learned somehow that there were trains to Milan from Gare de Lyon, so crossed the city via Metro or RER, half-resigned to spending the night at some station or other. Luck was on my side: there was an overnight service leaving at 22:09. The fare was a mere 404F.

It was a slow and uncomfortable trip, but I did manage to sleep sitting up for a couple of hours before dawn. At a quarter to nine on Sunday morning I was in Milan, with time for a brioche and a cappuccino before catching the ten o’clock train to Rome. That cost me a very reasonable 79,500 Lire for the four-hour trip. Once at my destination I booked into a hotel near Stazione Termini despite having insufficient leeway left on my credit card to pay for it.

Monday morning I set out to exurban Settecamini where my branch was located, and succeeded in closing my account and withdrawing the ten million or so remaining lire without incident. With a pocketful of cash I took a taxi to the airport and boarded the next flight back to Heathrow, making fulsome apologies for my unplanned absence while on my way back to the office, where I arrived early that afternoon. My cashflow troubles dragged on fitfully for a few months thereafter, but at least no more impromptu international travel was needed.

I held on to the train tickets as a keepsake of an adventure than could very easily have become a misadventure.

Sputnik

When I bought a vintage Hungarian-made safety razor from an ebay seller, included with it was a single Спутник (Sputnik) Soviet-era blade. The front and back of the blade’s wrapper are shown above. The razor wasn’t a great success, providing so mild an attack it was laborious getting any kind of close shave with the thing. Perhaps it would have worked better with the Sputnik installed, but I wasn’t so brave as to try it. The razor did at least come in useful that once I shaved my head during the first Covid lockdown.

Yost

I found the ad for the Yost Typewriter Co. shown above in a 1902 issue of The Connoisseur (‘A Magazine for Collectors’). Yōst is presumably shown with a macron over the ‘o’ to indicate it’s intended to rhyme with most or post rather than cost or lost. I don’t know why the couple depicted in the ad are dressed anachronistically: perhaps they’re depictions of well-known actors in roles the public might recognize?

According to the typewriter database, the Yost range current at the turn of the 20th century would have included their model 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 - all apparently variations of the same mechanism with differing carriage sizes. I’m guessing they would have been higher-end machines - in a Harrods Catalogue (issued a decade later, in 1912), the Yost Model 15 was priced at nine shillings and sixpence more than the equivalent Underwood and Remington standard models of the time.

Parker 61

When I bought a vintage Parker 61 fountain pen (six or seven years ago), it came with an original product information leaflet. Indeed the leaflet was more original than the pen itself, with the former extolling the vitues of Parker’s revolutionary capillary-action ink filling system, which they’d developed for the 61. Unfortunately for Parker, this system didn’t work anything like as well in the real world as it had in their labs, with many 61s later altered to use more conventional converter-style re-filling - the one I bought among them. Unfortunately for me, the plastic barrel of mine cracked and broke within a year of my acquiring it.

I enjoy using fountain pens, preferring them to ballpoints and rollerballs. For a year or two I was on course to their becoming the focus of yet another collection, but I ultimately stepped off that boat and let it set sail without me. I still have (and regularly use) half a dozen fountain pens, and own as many types of ink, and for me that has proven quite sufficient. Some will derive a thrill from owning numerous inks from around the world in all-but-indistinguishable shades of blue; and in having costly gold nibs precisely altered to their exacting specifications - I’ve conceded that my own taste in writing implements is just not that refined.

Invitation to the Dance

Here’s another from the set of movie stills I mentioned a few months ago, this one from Einladung zum Tanz (‘Invitation to the Dance’), starring and directed by Gene Kelly; filmed in 1952-4 but not released until ‘56. It’s a monochrome still taken from a colour production. The three figures fully in the frame are Igor Youskevitch, Kelly, and Claire Sombert. The still corresponds roughly with the 5:10 point in this YouTube clip, though the camera angle and framing seem slightly different.

When I looked up the movie (and saw a couple of excerpts) it rang a distant bell - I suspect I watched at least some of it on TV decades ago. It’s a three-part anthology with all the narrative and drama in each part communicated solely via the media of dance and mime, a premise which reputedly alarmed Kelly’s backers at MGM who overruled his original proposal not to appear in the film himself. When the movie belatedly saw daylight it was not a success, with Kelly’s choreography and “artistic pretensions” the subject of particular criticism.

Index Cards

I bought a ’50s index card ‘outfit’ a few years ago: that is, a Winel brand flip-top card-box, some alphabetical separators and a couple of hundred Whitehall 6"x4" cards. As well as the blank cards, there were a dozen typewritten ones left there by the set’s original owner, one for every month of the year, with major household expenses listed on each one.

The most significant expense through the year, described as ‘Building Society’ (presumably a monthly mortgage payment) was for £78 (£6 10s x 12). Besides that, the largest single amounts were for the annual rates bill (£29 18s 6d) and a fairly hefty £16 1s 3d for car insurance. The ‘A.P.S.W. Subscription’ on the January card suggests a membership of the Association for Professors of Social Work. Also in the box were a few pieces of professional correspondence all addressed to a Miss M_______ based near Sleaford, Lincs., who I imagine must have typed out the cards. These letters are all dated 1957, so I guess the cards most likely relate either to that year, or to 1958.

Return Thanks

It’s 1932, and Mr. Johnson has died suddenly in Gloucester. His grieving widow and four children have received many dozens of letters of sympathy and numerous floral tributes in the wake of his decease, for each of which etiquette demands a timely note of thanks in reply. Mrs. J. just doesn’t have it in her to tackle this onerous task - but, thankfully, there are services which will supply pre-printed responses in bulk, thereby enabling the family to adhere to the letter of the law of etiquette, if not quite its exacting spirit.

Recently I obtained (via ebay) a sample-book of such pre-printed messages including the example above. On the cover is the text Sharpe’s “Classic” / Return Thanks Stationery / British Manufacture, where Sharpe’s were the manufacturers providing the paper, cards and envelopes; and ‘Return Thanks’ (I presume) their service run in co-operation with participating printers, to supply the requisite personalisation. Loosely held in the book was some documentation relating to The Manor Press Ltd., Colchester, apparently the printers who had owned and used the book. Similar sample books would doubtless have been available for weddings, etc.

A range of paper styles & tints were on offer: hand-made off-white paper with deckle edges; white cards with Victorian-style black borders, or else un-bordered or edged with silver or grey; and also paper in a pale lavender shade, which I thought an odd choice until I learned that lavender/mauve was once recognised as a secondary colour associated with mourning. Some of the envelopes have surprisingly gaudy linings, as in the one above.

The forms of words in the samples are generic: customers may have fallen back on such standard phrasing or would have had the option to supply their own text. In a couple of cases the samples explicitly state that the bereaved “find it impossible to answer letters personally”, by way of explanation for the impersonality of a ready-made reply. In terms of the lettering used, script faces predominate, with sans serif and ‘Old English’ styles the other main options.

20th Century LOLcat

Found pressed between the pages of an old book was the newspaper clipping above, depicting a kitten seemingly in a transport of bliss. The caption reads: “Charmed! A kitten over which music has a strange fascination.” I’ve lightly photoshopped the original scan of the clipping, which is rather faded and yellowed.

The book is considerably older than the clipping: a copy of the 1853 eleventh edition of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature. This is a work I’ve long enjoyed dipping into; I’ve owned several copies of its various editions over the years. At one time I went as far as scanning and uploading a copy of it (beginning not long before Google Books' mass-digitization made it an even more quixotic endeavour than it might otherwise have been). A few years ago I’d been in need of freeing up some bookshelf-space, and deaccessioned a couple of multi-volume copies of the Curiosities, obtaining this single-volume one in their stead.

The specific copy I bought had ostensibly once belonged to the library of the politician Denis Healey, and indeed there’s a pencil inscription inside: Denis Healey / Withyham / May ‘77, at which time he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. I paid £20 for it. I have no way of knowing at what point in the book’s life the clipping was inserted, but like to think that Healey may have placed it there himself.

Crane's

I haven’t succeeded thus far in obtaining any of the wares of the notable US stationery manufacturers, which don’t seem to have been sold in any significant quanitites in the UK: it probably just wasn’t economically worth their while to export it transatlantically. I have, however, admired some of the advertising I’ve found on-line produced by the likes of the Eaton, Crane & Pike Company.

Above is a prime example from 1925 featuring a lady with a practically tubular silhouette admiring the box of Crane’s Cordilinear she received as a gift: “in writing paper, the very finest obtainable can be bought for as little as five dollars”, the copy maintains. The following 1924 ad, meanwhile, tries to persuade its readers there would be ghastly social repercussions if they were to use poor-quality stationery. Much as I admire a really nice sheet of paper, the appeal to snobbery here is enough to drive anyone to scribble on something cheap & nasty instead.

Menus

One of my less successful typewriter purchases was a 1956 Voss S24 I ordered from a French ebay seller in 2019. It was a good-looking machine that just about worked - albeit never altogether satisfactorily. It arrived screwed down inside its travel case: when I unscrewed it I found two slips of paper that had been stuck underneath on which (so it appeared) menus had been handwritten in pencil, perhaps ready to be typed up. Fortunately the writing is fairly legible, and I’ve been able to at least make a guess at what it all says:

• Potage du jour ou S[alade] de concombre
• Steak. Pommes frites
• Potage . Terrines[?] Crudités
• Rognons S[auce] Madère
• Tarte aux foies de volailles
• quenelles S[auce] Nantua
• cote de porc  p. purée
• canard Roti  Petits Pois
• Faux Filet Béarnaise

Makes me feel a bit peckish. Printed on the reverse of the same slip, meanwhile, is Cafés BALZAC / Le Régal des Connaisseurs, which could be the establishments where these dishes were served up. The other ‘menu’ (below) includes similar fare, with the following not included on the first slip:

• Petits Salés aux lentilles
• Tête de Veau Vinaigrette
• Escalope Viennoise

Red Flags

Continuing and concluding the East German theme, the above is one of two miscellaneous colour slides I found amidst the incomplete set of b&w film stills I’ve mentioned before. It depicts a parade through what I believe is East Berlin ca. 1960. I’ve mislaid the slide for the moment so can’t transcribe the caption printed on it. The other colour slide offers an uninviting interior view of an art gallery.

Special Bargain Offers

An interesting ebay purchase was a folder containing “Specimens of Die Stamping, Notepaper and Copperplate Printing” produced by the once-renowned London department store Harrods ahead of their 1940 January Sale. It contained the typewritten letter shown above, along with examples of stamped & printed personalised letterheadings, and samples of some of the various types of paper they stocked.

“Paper prices are literally soaring” begins the letter, getting straight to the point, before adding, realistically, that “even to-day’s prices will certainly go higher”. For some, it may have been a last chance to stock up before paper rationing took effect the following March, with, in its wake, measures such as the “Book Production War Economy Standard”. With the raw materials for paper-making (esparto, most notably) in ever shorter supply, British paper-makers were obliged in some cases to make do with rather less desirable stuff such as wheat-straw in its stead.

A Harrods catalogue of somewhat earlier vintage lists papers made by prestige manufacturers such as Joynson, Hollingworth, Towgood & Whatman, along with an extensive range of own-brand lines. I imagine their range wouldn’t have been too very different by 1940. Via separate ebay acquisitions I’ve had the chance to work my way through a cache of their ‘Hans Bank’ writing pads and to use a fine machine-made rag paper made by Hollingworth and sold by Harrods (I’m unsure when) under the ‘Stag of Kent’ brand: both were excellent.

Telephone Pen

John Heath is my father’s name, so when I saw a box of John Heath brand ‘Telephone Pen’ dip pen nibs on ebay I felt inclined to buy them.

‘JOHN HEATH’S FIRST CLASS EXTRA STRONG PENS.’ says the back of the box ‘Combine great thickness of metal with perfect flexibility and smoothness of action, and are far more durable than any others.’ A bold claim: I have my doubts.

‘All the latest improvements in steel pen machinery’ it continues ‘have been applied to the Manufacture of these pens; every process is conducted with extra care by the best “hands” and the PENS UNDERGO A MOST RIGID EXAMINATION before they are sent out. Purchasers will please observe that NONE ARE GENUINE without a fac-simile of the signature of JOHN HEATH on the label of each box … to imitate which is FORGERY.’

The Unguarded Moment

From an incomplete set of of black-&-white 35mm slides containing movie stills I bought from an antique market in Bristol several years ago, here’s one labelled as follows:

15. In den Fängen des Teufels
R: Harry Keller
R498 Bewegung vor der Kamera
Institut für Film und Bild

“R 498 Bewegung vor der Kamera” (“Movement on Camera”?) is the collective title for the set, from which I have slides 1-5 & 7-17. Google Translate suggests “In the Devil’s Clutches” as an English equivalent for In den Fängen des Teufels, a title which made no attempt to ape the original one: The Unguarded Moment.

This was an apparently undistinguished 1956 movie starring Esther Williams, aka the “million dollar mermaid”, who is depicted on the slide. Although the still looks like it could be something from a starkly monochrome film noir, the movie was a Technicolor one, as the trailer testifies. Why this film was singled out, and to what presumably educational end this image was selected from it - I do not know.