Monday, October the 18th, 2004
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Dobson once spent a week making a list of all the things he chewed. From Thursday to the following Wednesday, each time he chewed something he wrote down a keyword on a fresh sheet of A4 paper. So, for example, Saturday morning's batch included suet, button, Garibaldi biscuit, pencil, pastille, tongue, bootlace, boiled sweet and cork. Armed with a large sheaf of paper, the out-of-print pamphleteer spent the following week annotating these bald words. He wrote potted histories of manufacturing processes, Proustian evocations, trivial facts, hallucinatory scribblings, and passages of pseudo-scientific conjecture. He even added some crayon drawings that can best be described as primitive. In each case he restricted himself to the single A4 sheet. The work complete, he hawked his manuscript around all the publishing firms he knew who had offices in the slums. Not one of them would take it. In despair, Dobson stowed away on an aeroplane bound for Winnipeg, where he cast his manuscript into the Assiniboine. Returning home, he wrote the pitiful pamphlet How My Annotated List Of Chewed Things Was Lost In A Muddy Canadian River, copies of which he gave as Christmas presents to his friends in 1958.