Thursday, February the 23rd, 2006

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Certain Aspects of Plastic Baubles and Plastic Sheeting

Certain Aspects Of Plastic Baubles And Plastic Sheeting is one of those out-of-print pamphlets by Dobson that has acquired the aura of legend. Not even the most indefatigable of Dobsonistas claims ever to have seen a copy, let alone read it, and some authorities doubt that it ever existed at all.

There is, of course, the famous alleged cover of the pamphlet which was included in an exhibition held at the Museum At Or Near Ack-On-The-Vug in 1992 to celebrate the inauguration of the Cones Hotline, but this is almost certainly a fake.

John Major's government had introduced the Cones Hotline a few weeks before the show opened, and cones were much in people's thoughts. Dobson had an abiding interest in cones of all kinds, not just those used for traffic control, and we know that he drafted some notes on cones made of plastic, though those too are mysteriously missing from the archives.

Is it likely that the pamphleteer would have addressed the topic of plastic baubles and plastic sheeting without finding room for plastic cones as well? The enfant terrible of Dobson studies, Gaston Pewt, has this to say: “There can be no doubt in my mind that Certain Aspects Of Plastic Baubles And Plastic Sheeting only exists in the febrile minds of older, wizened Dobson scholars whose brains have been laid waste. Long ago they would have downed tonics and invigorators to combat dyspepsia, low spirits, nervousness, heartburn, colic pains, wind in the stomach or pains in the bowels, headache, drowsiness, kidney and liver complaints, melancholy, delirium tremens, and intemperance. Now they cannot get their hands on such potions, they pursue hopeless chimeras. I neither know nor care which ancient, slobbering poop-head inserted a counterfeit pamphlet cover into the Cones Hotline exhibition. What I know is that whoever did so was trying to feed their misplaced vanity, and score points over young, up and coming Dobsonistas like myself, even though at that time I had yet to publish my ground-breaking reappraisal of the out-of-print pamphleteer's plastic-related works.”

Stirring words indeed, but we should remember that every single copy of Monsieur Pewt's magisterial study, Plastic Dobson, was pulped before it reached the bookshops, for reasons which, like the legendary pamphlet itself, like those tonics and invigorators, like the wits of the Dobsonist old guard, and like the Cones Hotline, are now forever lost, they are swept away, they are swept away and gone.