Tells the story of a writing desk that one day grabbed two pairs of shoes, ran downstairs, and took flight, escaping into the countryside with its owners in barefoot pursuit. Includes a note with historical information.
When an unknown black poodle inexplicably explodes in philosophy professor Timothy Chesterton-Brown's back yard--paralyzing the professor and killing his guest--the "mystery of the sardine" begins. Its solution will involve such unwitting detectives as a twelve-year-old mathematician, his mother, his beloved, a palmist named Miss Prentice, and a bureaucrat dubbed the Minister of Imponderabilia. The clues they unearth--drawing on logic, the occult, intuition, and everything in between--lead them far away from the tiny seaside town where they begin. We follow them to Majorca, Rome, Warsaw, and London, but in the end, the solution lies beyond even the furthest and most magical reaches of reason.
Hobson's Island (so called because Mr. Hobson bought it, or did Mr. Hobson buy it because it was so called?) enjoyed decades of isolation in the Atlantic Ocean. For years, the caretakers lived there peacefully, with only a cow for company and an empty house to care for. But all is suddenly disrupted when a wave of unusual visitors arrive: a deposed African king fleeing a revolution, a Hobson descendant claiming ownership, government agents eyeing the nation-less real estate, and scientists looking to test a dangerous new invention. In typical Themerson fashion, the comic is wound up with the serious and let go to devastating effect. A clever and apt parodying of Cold War power plays and twisted science, Hobson's Island is a strangely touching, sympathetic, and emotional account of the families and individuals brought together and broken up by Hobson's Island.
With an introduction by Keith Waldrop Two riotous novels by the Polish-Born British writer Stefan Thermson, who with his wife Francesca ran the Baberbocchus press in London, which also published Schwitters and Russell. Bayamus recounts the adventures of a self-proclaimed mutant with three legs and his efforts to propogate a new species. Cardinal Polatuo is the biography of Apollinaire's anonymous father, including an insight into his frankly obscene dreamlife.