> LE MAÎTRE: Je rêve à une chose, c'est si ton bienfaiteur eû été cocu, parce qu'il était écrit là-haut; ou si cela était écrit là-haut, parce que tu ferais cocu tu bienfaiteur ?
>
> JACQUES: Tous le deux étaient écrits l'un à côté de l autre. Tout a été écrit à-la-fois. C'est comme un grand rouleau qui se déploie petit à petit...
Denis Diderot (From his novel published in 1797)
On the Feast Day of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, not even nuns visited Bup, but only because heavy snow with whistling wind once again took it upon themselves to clean the dried bird droppings on many New York roofs. So with none to serve up, I was left alone with a few hissing creatures in the freezing secret den, bell-head hammering a few more leaves while also trying hard not to shiver. And on that blizzardy day in 1941, an urge with an imp pulse drove me to my first minor literary crime. For now, let that crime be a mystery not worth solving before knowing the history and exploring the many myths of the Bup.
So many nuns, monks, and even some idolized atheistic leaders of self-respect movements frequent Bup for a particular aesthetic service. They often bring a popular fiction book that they believe has damning words to have a glossary inserted before the first chapter with similar-sounding but safe words from a different language. So, many manic English Grammarians and some weary polyglots have been cursing Bup for contributing to the ever-growing list of unintentional and unwarranted homonyms.
Some non-monastic rare book lovers entering Bup Custom Bookbinding & Antique Bookstore are bound to leave only after leaving cursive leaves with curses in the vintage gothic-style oak letter box placed for customer suggestions, all because they often tend to misread the end word. Occasionally, a drunk or two enter the store after reading Bup backward and misinterpreting the New Wine in an Old Bottle sign hanging on the door. They leave us cursing for not having distilled spirits.
And on the days when there are no such characters to liven my day, this downtrodden building feels like a shack for storing old fading printed papers categorized as academic journals, magazines, pamphlets, and even some books that may or may not have been once popular but now expertly panned often by those claiming to have access to rare manuscripts as works of literary hacks. Those slanting words are also the kind and length of titles on pamphlets hidden in Bup's secret den across from a heap of slandering titles by literary geniuses not considered hacks. And the literary hack is a prestigious title (even when handed pejoratively) worth pondering in due time.
Henry Baker, the owner of this shack and my mentor, is not a fraudster but just a tricky craftsman opting to compete with expensive machines and printing mavens of mass production. In 1930, as a fifty-year-old unsuccessful novelist, Mr. Baker had a rather strange mid-life crisis after reading the news of Pennsylvanian Poet Howard Baker's marriage to Dorthy Alice Dodds.
For almost a decade, Mr.Baker had been working on his first novel - The Exception Proves the Rule now as A Foolish Romance Novel. During the roaring twenties, he sent this novel to the editors of Gyroscope for a review. A few weeks later, he got an unsigned scathing review ending with these six words: unpoetic trashy metaphors with lackluster characters.
It suffices to say that any novelist would be disappointed with such a scathing review, and some readers may likely sympathize with the novelist even if it is a fair review. Even though Mr.Baker is my mentor, after learning why he wrote this novel and his excuse for sending it to only Gyroscope, I feel more sympathetic toward the reviewer.
Gyroscope, the spinning wheel, and not the literary magazine, has befuddled Mr.Baker since 1907. After reading a Louis Brennan interview about how experimenting with a gyroscope toy helped him design the Gyro monorail, Mr.Baker became a gyro enthusiast. Hoping to invent something, he started cheaply by staring at the spinning wheel from his old bicycle hanging on a rope.
After four decades of buying various gyro gadgets and books, Mr. Baker has yet to invent anything but still uses the old wheel gyro for his daily fuzzy logical meditation. An attempt at Isaac Newton's thought experiment from a 1723 translation of a pirated copy of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica yielded a Physics weasel caving in after breaking a glass vessel hung on a long cord and Mrs.Baker slipping on a wet floor. This 1908 botched experiment prevented Mr.Baker from trying to send sound waves to Ernst Mach and swirling with the works of Albert Einstein.
On the day Mr.Baker received the scathing review from Gyroscope, he coped with the rejection by opening the Made in France labeled black box with a yellow lid. Inside the box were a cheap metal gyroscope and a rope. Unlike the various brass gyroscope toys he owns, it is easier to write words on this French toy before it colorfully swirls. So, he took those six words from the review and wrote his first bilingual tercet on the gyroscope toy:
Lackluster metaphors,
Poubelle characters,
Awake non poétiques.
As those words colorfully swirled, Mr.Baker took a moment to write an ode to Eugène Poubelle for being part of the clean revolution while wondering how young namesakes are mentally faring on the playgrounds. Nouns and synonyms have been kinder to many poets but not to Mr. Baker, so he threw his ode into the small waste basket on top of his novel.
Mr.Baker's novel is about a young female novelist wanting to be loved by a rich old narcist. The first chapter begins with an etched painting of Yggdrasill, the Mundane tree by Oluf Olufsen Bagge with a lot of seemingly illegible words on rocks from the Scholarly writings of Finnur Magnússon (Mr.Baker wanted to pay homage to Magnússon, but his cheap weak etcher was not a Rhode Scholar, so with a missing eye he naturally ruined everything), and these two epigraphs above it:
> Only fools fall in love and they are laughed at the very idol they bow down to. Money is the charm by which a man can win a woman's heart.
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>
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> Mrs Olinthus Lobb (Louisa Sarah Ann Parr)
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> Chapter XVIII, Dorothy Fox
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> Living Age (October 1870)
> A metaphysical work is named - 'I never read such books; it takes attention from more important subjects.' A poem is mentioned with applause - 'I only read Byron.' Someone has fallen in love with a pretty girl - 'I never was in love, and I think only fools fall in love;' the boa forgetting that he has all his life been so much in love with himself as to be totally incapable of loving anything else.
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>
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> Orlando Sabretash (Major General John Mitchel)
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> Jottings From Captain Orlando Sabretash
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> Chamber's Edinburgh Journal (September 1842)
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>
Also, wanting to pay homage to the two writers and the painter, he named the female novelist Dorthy Baker and the rich narcist Potash Oliemaler. Since this was an unlawful and awful romance with no chemistry and the novel had to be plotted around Pasquale with five infernal cupids as jurists, he could not rely on many mainly manly romantic cliches. After filling nearly three hundred pages with quirky sentences, he ended the novel with the Quintet silencing a harping Pasquale:
> We are devils, Pasquale! - poor devils, like you! - we're old fools: - ho, ho, ho! - we're the infernal cupids we're the devils that make old fools fall in love!
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> Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann
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> Die Serapionsbrüder - Vierter Band - Siebenter Abschnitt - Signor Formica (1821)
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> (translated by someone not wanting any credit, to be taken seriously)
He also added an endnote as an apology to E.T.A. Hoffman by using the convenient excuse: German is a challenging language to translate into English (on österliche to fit a narrative musically in C minor without a Harp while eating an egg).
After accepting the scathing review from Gyroscope as an intellectual assessment, Mr.Baker gave up being a novelist and moved on by focusing more on his father's small business. But not before writing an ode to gimbals, praising all, from the various ones used in ships to prevent slippage of objects to even the ones described by Philo Mechanicus with ink pots. Being too old to gambol and always hesitant to do what it sounds like, Mr.Baker opted not to send his self-indulgent ode for any review. And part of his hesitancy was due to a book released by New Yorker Gilbert Milligan Tucker.
Tucker, an author now known also as the father of one more Titanic survivor, had written American English, a book New York Times in 1921 lauded:
> It is a book to be taken seriously; it is a book well planned, well documented, and well written.
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> Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Well! This book has six chapters:
1. Is Our English Degenerating?
2. Ten Important Treatises
3. Exotic Americanism
4. Some Real Americanism
5. Misunderstood and Imaginary Americanism
6. The Bibliography of the Subject
The word gimbal appears in the fourth chapter - Some Real Americanism which has more slippery clauses than the ones in Article IV of the United States Constitution. While attempting to construct a sentence using all three words, immediately before and after the gimbal in American English, Mr.Baker had a giggle fit:
GIGGIT - Convey rapidly, 1862.
GIMBAL (jaw) - Loose and projecting.
GINMILL - Barroom.
Maybe it is worth noting neither GIGGIT nor GINROOM made it into Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged Dictionary under the supervision of Reverend Noah Porter), and GIMBAL has the standard science-related definition. Since some lands and islands still rely on Porter's editions to understand American English literature, Mr.Baker feared the gimbal too may soon slide into the fifth chapter of American English.
GIGGIT is a word Mr.Baker fearfully forbears in any literary work because of his family's Legend of the Baker Black Sheep Forebear, about their Baker forefather shipped to New York in the 17th Century. But before printing such legends, it is customary for a Bup Bookbinder to share a cautionary tale to survive in a trade with often uncertain customers.
In 1938, when Dorthy Baker released her first novel, Young Man with a Horn, Mr.Baker lost his mind, so he started searching for only a Pennsylvanian apprentice as some form of repentance, and luck struck for a fool. A year later, as a sixteen-year-old lad, I bravely came to New York without disappointing any high school teachers in Allentown to become Mr.Baker's lone apprentice.
After mastering the art of folding an octavo sheet into four folds to create eight leaves and call them sixteen pages, I learned never to use a folding stick as a back-scratching implement. Soon after unhappily learning to refold, I also learned to use a smooth stone as a bed to make a book as solid as possible with a hammer, and at Bup, we call it bell-head hammering instead of beating or rolling.
Two months later, I was ready for the art of collating but had to pause to attend to a restoration job brought in by a mature lady probably eight to ten years older than me. She brought four volumes titled Plays written by the late Ingenious Mrs. Behn, all third editions printed in 1724. Unfortunately, eight years have passed, and I have almost matured without the lady picking up my handy work with Modern English typographical restoration. Two weeks after World War II had officially begun, while I was dreading, Mr.Baker forced me to read and perform (like a radio play) seventeen plays written by Aphra Behn and printed for (or edited by) Molly Paulson. All in all, that was my punishment for failing to collect a deposit from a pretty lady.
Most of my daily performances during dinner did not pan well with Mr. and Mrs. Baker, especially The Widow Rancher brought a lot of hissing and was abruptly stopped before the third act. But one particular scene from The City Heiress did receive an emotional standing ovation. After performing the first three acts while listening to lots of hissing and occasionally noticing their blank stares, I stumbled into an applausive performance with Act IV:
ACT IV, SCENE 1 - A Dressing Room
Lady Galliard is discovered in an undress at her table, glass, and toilette, Closet attending: As soon as the scene draws off, she rises from the table as disturbed and out of Humor.
Lady Galliard: Come, leave your everlasting Chamber-Maid's Chat, you dull Road of Slandering by rote, and lay that Paint aside. Thou art fuller of false News, than unlicens'd Mercury.
Mrs. Closet: I have good Proof, Madam, of what I say.
Lady Galliard: Proof of a thing impossible!- Away.
Mrs. Closet: Is it a thing so impossible, Madam, that a Man of Mr. Wilding's Parts and Person should get a City-Heiress? Such a bonne Mien, and such a pleasant Wit!
Lady Galliard: Hold thy fluent Tattle, thou hast Tongue enough to talk an Oyster-Woman deaf: I say it cannot be --- What means panting of my troubled Heart! Oh my presaging Fears! Shou'd what she says prove true, How wretched and how lost thing am I! [Aside.
Mrs. Closet: Your Honour may say your pleasure; but I hope I have not liv'd to these Years to be impertinent --- No, Madam, I am none of those that run up and down the Town a Story-hunting, and a Lye-Catching, and ---
Lady Galliard: Eternal Rattle, peace--- Mrs. Charlot Gett-all go away with Wilding! A Man of Willding's extravagant Life Get a fortune in the City Though mightst as well have told me, a Holder- forth were married to a Nun: There are not two such Contraries in Nature, 'Tis flam, 'tis foolery, 'tis most impossible.
At this point, I had to interrupt my dual voice performance because Mrs. Behn had again inserted the devil into another one of her titillating lines, and I had to keep an old promise. My devout Presbyterian Mama once forced me to write a thousand times the line: I shall never utter the word devil till I go to hell. Now more than then, thanks to some synonyms, I find such premises easy to keep - sorry for the miserly e instead of o confusion, I meant to write promises.
Not wanting to confuse the Bakers, I chose to skip a whole sequence of dialogues with repetitive use of the word prostitute and perform a song from the next page. Unfortunately, unlike previous acts, this Aphra Behen operatic song had a line with the devil, so I had to cut my poor castrato imitation. And thanks to my late Mapa, I quickly remembered an unsuitable ballad - The Whigs Disloyal Feast Prohibited (set to the tune of Ben Johnson's Cook Laurell) for my imagined voice of Mrs. Galliard. According to Mapa, this was a famous ballad written during the 1680s war of words between R.Janeway’s The Impartial Protestant Mercury and a short-lived publication known as The Mock Press:
Have you not heard of a festival conven'd of late,
Compos'd of a Pack of Notorious Dissenters,
Appointed by Tinkers in Whigland to meet,
To sign and seal Convenated Indentures?
Next came Janeway, Curtis, Vile, and Care,
With his Packet of Lies thrust under his arm ;
Then Don Dangerfieldo, more subtle by far
Than poor Mother Cellier acted no harm.
Mrs. Baker suddenly stood up, waving her fork like a conductor to tell me I had skipped a few stanzas, while Mr.Baker sipping on a glass of Scotch, seemed as confused as I was. I froze and wondered why Mapa avoided those stanzas. Seeing me dazed and confused, Mrs. Baker once again waved her fork with a smile for me to continue:
All sorts of Informers were bid to be there,
And the damn'd Ignoramous Jurors too,
To participate of this Festival cheer,
By way of Thanksgiving for what they did do.
Some hundreds more were to be at the Feast,
And all things thereunto were fitted
But in steps an Order which forestall'd the Guests,
Disbanding the Cooks ere the Meat was half spitted.
Before I could sing one of my favorite stanzas: Some think it was like the Oxford old stroke, Mr.Baker jumped out of his seat, gulped some whisky directly from his Scotch bottle, and started waving his hands to stop my performance. Mrs. Baker snatched the bottle from him and requested I skip all the songs. While she was busy consoling her sobbing husband, I had to move past a few more dialogues with a devil reference to find an apt line to resume my performance. After blaming the Scotch whisky and not my singing for Mr. Baker's tears, I picked things up with a character previously jeered by the couple:
Wilding: Nay, but Mrs.Closet , Pray take me right,This Country-man of yours, as I was saying --
Lady Galliard: Chang’d already from a Kinsman to a Countryman! a plain Contrivance to get my Woman out of the Room. Closet, as you value my Service, stir not from hence.
Wilding: This Country-man of yours, I say, being left Executor by your Father’s last Will and Testament , is come -- Dull Waiting- woman, I wou’d be alone with your Lady; know your Cue and retire.
Mrs. Closet: How, Sir!
Wilding: Learn, I say, to understand Reason when you hear it. Leave us awhile; Love is not a game for thee to play at. [ Gives her Mony.
Mrs. Closet: I must own to all World, you have Convinc’d me; I ask a thousand Pardons for my Dulness. Well, I’ll be gone, I’ll run; you’re most powerful Person, the very Spirit of Persusion - I’ll steal out - You have such a taking way with you -- But I forgot my self. Well, your most obedient Servant; whenever you’ve occasion, Sir, be pleas’d to use me freely.
Wilding: Nay, dear Impertinence, no more Complements, you see I’m busy now; prithee be gone, you see I am busy.
Mrs. Closet: I am all Obedience to you, Sir -- Your most obedient --
Lady Galliard: Whither are you fisking and giggiting it now?
Mrs. Closet: Madam, I am going down, will return immediately, immidiately.
And immediately after that line, I heard the couple clapping and saw them up on their feet. I knew an Allentown standing ovation always meant some family member wanted me to stop acting silly and go to bed, but I felt mystified not knowing what brought this New York standing ovation. Soon, I got repeat requests for Lady Galliard's line, and after repeating the same line several times, I needed to know why. The City Heiress ended abruptly, and a drunk Mr.Baker shared The Legend of the Baker Black Sheep Forebear.