Monday, August the 16th, 2004
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There is a book about the birth of the Beatles, called something like The Day John Met Paul, giving a blow-by-blow account of the day in 1957 when the twosome first encountered each other, the idea being, I suppose, to show how this seemingly mundane twenty four hours had epochal consequences. I have often thought a more fitting topic for such a volume would be the initial meeting of Snowflake and Prig, the women who paired up to create what was for me the most exciting publishing firm of the twentieth century.
Potus John F Kennedy was, famously, in office for little more than a thousand days—one thousand and thirty six, to be exact. By one of those coincidences that seems more significant than it actually is, Snowflake & Prig (Publishers) Ltd existed for an identical length of time, although happily, in the bookish case, no assassin's bullet, from schoolbook depository or grassy knoll or elsewhere, was involved in their demise.
Perhaps Snowflake & Prig are overlooked today not so much because of the lamentable decline of literacy in our culture but because they only ever published four books, all of which are out of print, one of which is virtually unreadable*, and none of which was written by Dobson. The three remaining titles, however, belong on the bookshelves of anyone who calls themselves a reader.
In a fortuitous echo of the previous item, the first book issued by Snowflake & Prig was Jasper Glucose's thriller Attack Of The Killer Bee. That's Bee, not Bees. Glucose subverts the genre in which he writes by having his lethal buzzing insect separated from its swarm, imbuing the tale with existentialist despair at a time when Jean-Paul Sartre was but a mewling infant dribbling onto his bib.
A year later, the second title to astonish the world was Attack Of The Killer Hornets From Jesuit City, also by Glucose, described by one anonymous reviewer as “the most exciting adventure story about killer hornets I have ever read”, and compared elsewhere to Poe, Lovecraft, and, in its frequent poetic passages, to Tupper.
Then came that blot on the Snowflake & Prig copybook, the Scrimgeour memoir. The firm was now in grave difficulties. Constance Snowflake had a near-fatal lacrosse accident, and Lavender Prig began to suffer from that debilitating compulsion to plod back and forth in the garden, following every step of her pet tortoise, Harry. There was, however, one last triumph before the inevitable bankruptcy, A Compendium Of Informative Essays About All Known Types Of Grease, Together With Four Mezzotints Depicting A Violent Thunderstorm. Had I but words to describe this marvellous, marvellous book! But I have not.
* NOTE : I refer to Scrimgeour's Memoirs Of A Factotum, about which you can read more in chapter nine of our exciting serial Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, which appears today.