
Next, a poem that I found on a folded-up piece of paper inside a book:

I love you Tim with all my heart
I know this full well
In poetry they say thou art and the rest can go to ****!
Lets cut yab (?) and say to you that I wish you liked me to
Also lets say that you are fab and better than doctor who
I love you true and I hope that you realize it
If you don't like it and really despize it
I shall get my brother on to you and you
will regretize it.
To think that I almost threw the piece of paper away, unaware of its hidden treasure. I don't know when it was written, but "fab" had become passé by the mid-1970s.
I wonder if the author "regretized" writing this poem?
On a slightly more exalted note, another book yielded this leaflet, with a beautiful woodcut by Robert Gibbings:
I know this full well
In poetry they say thou art and the rest can go to ****!
Lets cut yab (?) and say to you that I wish you liked me to
Also lets say that you are fab and better than doctor who
I love you true and I hope that you realize it
If you don't like it and really despize it
I shall get my brother on to you and you
will regretize it.
To think that I almost threw the piece of paper away, unaware of its hidden treasure. I don't know when it was written, but "fab" had become passé by the mid-1970s.
I wonder if the author "regretized" writing this poem?
On a slightly more exalted note, another book yielded this leaflet, with a beautiful woodcut by Robert Gibbings:

On the subject of illustration, every since I wrote about Victorian colour printing technology, I have discovered around a dozen nineteenth century books with plates that seem far ahead of their time. This is the frontispiece to an 1874 copy of "The Heir of Redclyffe":


It reminds me of some photos a friend used to receive from his penfriend - a girl in Nottingham.
She liked to design and make her own clothes and would create costumes that made Steve Strange look like Man at C&A. Once the outfits were complete, she'd put them on and have her photograph taken. When I saw the pictures, I always used to notice the contrast between the glamour of the clothes and the drab setting: the front room of a council house, with a gas fire in the background, a faded Hay Wain on the wall and a complete absence of books.
I wonder if there were any bookless houses in the Socialist paradise of the Soviet Union?

In fact, this is just a school textbook for young children, with lots of pictures like these:

How do I get from Russia to the King of Greece? I'll take the Orthodox route. The next item is the front of an envelope I found in a book:


Finally, glasses. I think that some women can look incredibly sexy in glasses, but I'm not sure if this is one of those occasions:

8 comments:
Sadly, he's not...
http://www.the-gardners.com/gardner/81.htm
Thanks for finding this information. How sad that Maxwell Craig Barton only lived to the age of 43.
Are you going to send them a copy of the picture?
Definitely.
I think the line in question in the poem is "let's cut gab" - gab meaning chat or blah - so 'let's cut the crap and get to the point' by extension.
Ah, thank you John.
That girl in the home-made clothes needed a blog!
A blog would have been perfect for her - perhaps it would have helped her to meet lots of like-minded people, instead of focussing all of her hopes on a distant penfriend in Twickenham.
To everyone's horror, my friend actually married her.
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