William English's 'Perfect Binding: Made in Leicester'

About a year ago, the filmmaker William English asked me, a sound designer, to be graphic designer for a book project he was planning.  This was just one of many lateral decisions taken by William English towards producing a uniquely uncategorisable artefact now available to buy: 'Perfect Binding: Made in Leicester'.  Even though I worked closely with William on this book, I'm unqualified to make definitive remarks on it.  It covers an era and culture I'm not 100% au fait with, and further complications are afforded by William's wilful abstractions.  Nevertheless, some opinions and gossip can be provided here.

The book features large roman numeral chapter numberings, and the use of archaic-looking discretionary ligatures on the typeface (stopping short of using the 18th century long s - ſuch a ſtrange flouriſh might've been a ſtep too far).  These unhip, non-modern quirks are deliberately deployed to subvert the book's subject matter, which superficially revolves around 'mod' culture in 1960s Leicester.  Anyone buying it for 'mod' reasons might be perplexed...  The book is a surreal dreamscape shifting between gritty Leicester vignettes: interviews and reminiscences interspersed with arresting, and sometimes baffling, archival matter.

ResonanceFM's Cafe Oto stall

Over the past few weeks 'Perfect Binding' has been creeping into shops.  It was recently spotted at Cafe Oto's Christmas fair earlier this month, where it sat on Resonance FM's stall, along with rare materials from the personal collection of Resonance's programme controller Dr. Ed Baxter (formerly of the LMC) whose Henry Cow posters and public information cassettes threatened to 'outodd' the oddness of 'Perfect Binding'.  It's important to introduce here the fact that Baxter is known for his Baxterisms.  Baxterisms are poetic emissions that paradoxically puncture all poetic pretence.  A Baxterism is both a verbal wrecking ball and a verbal building contractor...  Often contrarian, sometimes maybe temporarily devastating, Baxter had offered a satisfying one-word Baxterism for the title of William English's book: Omphalosophy.  At its production stage, this was earmarked to be its title.  Omphalos is Greek for "navel", and Leicestershire is indeed the centremost county of England; its geographical navel.  (The Ordnance Survey declared a point in Fenny Drayton, a village 15 miles from Leicester, to be England's true centre - a distinctly unexciting fact).  Omphalosophy also signifies navel gazing: a morbidly self-referential state of indulgence that pervades all self-published work to some degree (the blog you're reading now included).  William and I found Omphalsosophy to be a suitably profound and subtly self-mocking title for this work about Leicester-as-a-state-of-mind.  Unfortunately, I found that Omphalosophy had already been used for a book title over sixty years ago.  As newly-formed bands often despair with increasing regularity: "why are all the best names already taken?"

Diagrams from 'Omphalosophy' (c.1953)

'Omphalosophy...' (1953)

'Omphalosophy and Worse Verse: An Inquiry into the Inner (and Outer) Significance of the Belly Button' was published in Iowa, USA, c.1953, coincidentally by another William - a Dr. William Bennett Bean.  It was a slim poetry booklet, with curious illustrations.  One of Dr. Bean's poems discouraged William from using 'Omphalosophy' as a title: a poem called 'Amazonia: USA' presented as a "litany on the decline of the male in our growing matriarchy, written after a sullen view of insurance statistics and newspapers".  Dr. Bean was stubbornly non-progressive on gender matters: "And what I read does most alarm me / A soldier boy who left our army / Between new hormones and the knife / Is now a girl and may be wife", and so on...  Despite its curiosity, we didn't want to be associated with dusty old transphobia, especially as the first interviewee in William English's book is the trans artist Victoria Ashley who had transitioned from Jim Mellors in the 1990s.  But that's not to say that Ms. Ashley herself is any exemplar of progressiveness... Indeed, she's something of a sourpuss in William's interview, moaning that "women are such a scruffy load of bags today, girls going out with just tights on, showing their genitals and fat arses... oh, it really is disgusting."  Nevertheless...

All characters in William's book, in fact, tend to exhibit this individualistic bite - a 'pulling apart' from other people, sometimes to self-destructive extremes (the book suggests this is a peculiarly male trait).  These volatile qualities led William to arrive at the title 'Perfect Binding' - a glue-based form of bookbinding in which 'perfect' is a misleading overstatement, as pages are liable to break apart with regular use.  Similarly, the personalities in the book jostle to disbind themselves from each other, perhaps in an attempt to escape Leicester itself(?).  'Perfect Binding' is actually published as a sewn binding.  Figures forcibly stitched together include some renowned characters such as William's film photographer brother Jack English, co-founder of the BOY boutique Stephane Raynor, and fashion photographer David Parkinson who died young.  But then there are the less-extroverted figures who selflessly and perseveringly sought to animate Leicester's cultural landscape (and who sometimes met with resistance), such as Peter Josephs who set up the Chameleon coffee bar on King Street, and Roger Brian De L’Troath whose short-lived 'Crescent' publication was Leicester's earliest arts magazine.  Beyond this, 'Perfect Binding' documents other figures of such obscurity that they approach the quality of 'thwarted histories': their stories are virtually unknown.  Familiar Leicester names like Colin Wilson or Joe Orton are mere footnotes here.

'Jelly' in 'Perfect Binding'

Leicester clearly isn't the most glamorous location, but it has recently received some attention elsewhere by author Shaun Knapp, notably 'Mods: Two City Connection' (2019).  Whereas Knapp provides a fairly straightforward history, William English's 'Perfect Binding' is proof of lived history's irreconcilable untidiness, as well as the multi-dimensionality of primary source material.  Everyone constructs their own reality; how can this be documented effectively?  For instance, 'Perfect Binding' devotes a whole chapter to the contested origins of a mysterious red suede jacket, worn by Leicester "face" and proto-Mod John "Jelly" Nixon at a time when such sartorial nonconformity might trigger public convulsions.  William English's group interview*, recorded in 2004, with Nixon, Stephane Raynor, and fashionable rogue Bob Hughes sheds no light on the matter, throwing up hazy, conflicting testimony.  The red suede jacket is symbolic of what is uncapturable by historians (but which is potentially explorable by artists!).

We are all inextricably tied to our formative cultural memories, and the 1960s contains William's.  I grew up in the 1990s, an era that holds a certain fascination for me - the ideals of modems, cyberspace and email.  Sometimes I feel that a form of investigative time travel is possible by a mixture of meditation and scrutiny upon archival footage of 1990s TV advert breaks, continuity announcements, or within CD-ROM magazine coverdisk directories, or in gunk plucked out from inside a rollerball-based computer mouse...  it is almost as if by tilting the artefacts slightly - metaphysically speaking - light can be shone down the memory tunnels to illuminate the past from a different, fresher angle, thereby exposing history's complex webbing.  This, I think, is what William's 'Perfect Binding' is getting at.  It's a fresh primary source nugget, preserving all the dimensions of raw absurdity, natural poetry and factual overlap that characterise real life's ongoing historical continua.

William English researching

As well as sifting his archive, over the years William has been leafing through Leicester's local newspapers questing after what I presume to be that aforementioned metaphysical memory 'tilt' ('Perfect Binding' is the result of over a decade of interviews and contemplation).  William ceased researching any newspapers published beyond 1965, as his focus was on the cultural metamorphoses within the first half of that decade.  I, meanwhile, continued casually perusing for graphical inspiration.  This led to the discovery of what would later become the rear cover of 'Perfect Binding' - an extraordinary uncredited long-exposure photograph from the Leicester Mercury of September 5th 1969.  Titled "Picture 'painted' by Leicester’s bumpy roads," it was intended to highlight the issue of Leicester's poor road conditions.  Its creator is as yet unknown.  To end this blog-post, I quote the full caption for it below, as it pits the mundane against the the surreal, with a mildly snooty sardonic thrust... perhaps these are the special ingredients for a 'Leicesterism'?

Rear and front covers for William English's 'Perfect Binding'

"No, it's not another puzzle pic, but a brand new art form which we are calling 'car camera doodling'.  The white-on-black scrawligig was produced by a car passenger holding a camera on a half-minute time exposure to the windscreen of the moving car along Leicester's London Road.  The varying squiggle design was made by lights of other cars ahead through a camera shuddering itself under impact of Leicester's bumpy roads.  The result: A careless, surrealistic picture in the night.  Painted, it would probably fetch a fortune in the trendy art world." (Leicester Mercury, 5/9/69)

* Some of the interviews contained in 'Perfect Binding' were originally partly aired on William English's long-running radio series Wavelength on Resonance 104.4FM.

'Perfect Binding: Made in Leicester' is out now.

A Postmodern Cut-Up Text from 1860: 'A Strange Composition' in The Brighton Examiner

Old volumes of The Brighton Examiner are held only by the British Library.  Most are 'restricted access' - their bindings are too fragile for readers to handle.  None are yet digitised.  Through persevering applications, I was recently able to view some 1860s volumes in person.  The newspaper of January 3rd 1860 happens to contain a startlingly postmodern emission, constituting a deliberately mangled text-palimpsest that seemed interesting enough to present here (see below).  But first, I should explain why I was leafing through this restricted newspaper in the first place...

An ongoing project of mine involves close-reading anonymous autobiographies to uncover authors' identities using search macros within digital archives.  Systematically inputting details - dates and places - into databases can triangulate identities in ways scarcely imaginable to those anonymous writers of old.  Sometimes however, progress is scuppered by brick walls: authors may deliberately fabricate biographical details, or, more problematically, the resources that may contain the necessary data might not even be digitised yet.

Roundabout Gossip (1862)

One difficult book beset by both these issues is 'Roundabout Gossip' (1862) published by J. F. Eyles in Brighton.  It contains 158 pages of barbed gossip, featuring thinly veiled references to literary figures, such as travel writer Lady Sydney Morgan, and proto-sociologist Harriet Martineau.  Its narrator calls himself/herself "Timothy Fitzwiggins" of the fictitious "Blackberry Park" in Gloucestershire.  Much like if Frederick Marryat decided to remain anonymous after publishing his fictitious 1829 first-person story 'Frank Mildmay', the red herrings amidst the rich detail leave future researchers lost at sea.  Searching with doubtful data yields only noise and confusion.

A more sensible person would give up at this point, but the book roused curiosity, so I continued digging around.  One possible way of shedding light upon the author of 'Roundabout Gossip' might be through investigating its curious publisher, John Frederick Eyles of 77 North Street, Brighton.  J. F. Eyles was a printer who also published The Brighton Examiner newspaper.  It appears to be the only newspaper in the world to have mentioned 'Roundabout Gossip', appraising it as "a most amusing and agreeable contribution to the light literature of the day".  In business since 1844, J. F. Eyles was suddenly declared bankrupt in July 1860.  'Roundabout Gossip' appeared in the summer of 1862, and though it's unlikely that Eyles wrote the book himself, it's plausible that one of his creditors devised it as a vanity project in lieu of payment (particularly as it was reported that Eyles had secured an amicable arrangement with his creditors in September 1860).

Cheap-paper Literature... (1861)

Throughout this troubled period, Eyles continued to publish The Brighton Examiner, but the only other recorded publication with Eyles' imprint from around this time is a 12-page pamphlet titled 'Cheap-paper Literature at the Hammer' (1861): an auction-room dialogue satirising modern literary trends.  I believe the 'Roundabout Gossip' author also wrote this anonymous pamphlet - some phrases are identical.  Both this pamphlet and 'Roundabout Gossip' are characterised by a grappling with modernity: the elderly author is cynical of mass-market literature, the rise of public lecturing, evolutionary theory, progressive religious "Neology", etc.  Both publications actually hover in a satirisation feedback loop, not least because they are both themselves products of modern media (for the 1860s).  'Cheap-paper Literature...' is published on cheap paper.

No libraries hold 'Roundabout Gossip'.  The British Library is the only institution holding both 'Cheap-paper Literature at the Hammer' and copies of The Brighton Examiner (which began circulation in 1853).  For the past year, I've been pestering the library and the British Newspaper Archive to digitise the 1860s issues of The Brighton Examiner.  A special request to view the physical volumes was generously granted by the library a few months ago.  I had hoped that by looking at them, familiar Gossipy phrases might leap out the page, or recurring names might provide a lead, but the mystery of 'Roundabout Gossip' was not solved.

Physically searching newspapers reveals unexpected things.  With modernity in mind, and by way of stressing the interestingness of The Brighton Examiner, I present this highly unusual column that caught the eye: the first issue of 1860 contains a text described tongue-in-cheekly as a tipsy New Year's Eve reveller's "wild bit of writing" found on the pavement "in a wet and dirty condition" on the morning of New Years Day.  It is actually a string of garbled adverts and news items from previous issues - it prefigures the 'cheap paper literature' cut-ups of the next century.

Journalistic Jumbles (1884)

This is not the earliest pre-postmodern anachronism - E.T.A Hoffmann's 1820 satirical novel 'The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr' is often cited in this respect (in which two autobiographies are supposedly merged by accident) - but this Brighton Examiner editorial nugget is a curio, and certainly of a more artistic, laboured origin than examples in the typo-celebrating 'Journalistic Jumbles, or Trippings in Type' of 1884 (which it reminded me of).  The Brighton Examiner's 'Strange Composition' column reads thus:

A STRANGE COMPOSITION

The following wild bit of writing is said to have formed part of the contents of a bundle of papers picked up on the pave, on Tuesday last, in a wet and dirty condition, by an early matutinal stroller.  The writer, whoever he may be, had rather evidently been "dining out," which, as Monday was a holiday, may to a certain extent be excusable, and hence apparently the general obscurity as to meaning or intention which pervades the composition.  The intelligent reader is invited to make what he can out of it, and so no more of preface.

- Good dinner - Nice wine - read Brighton Examiner - write to the Editor - second bottle - on Monday the powder mills at Hounslow blew up - being St. Patrick's day - Lord Palmerston enquired - if you really want pure gin - aged 76, married to a young girl of 18 - Holloway's pills - gratis to sufferers - Benson's watches - pains in the back - deposit and discount bank - a quantity of new sovereigns were issued at - five shillings a bushel to the poor - selling off at cost price - a railway truck accident - was convicted for keeping a disorderly house - mayor and principal resident gentry took - Kaye's Worsdell's pills - Thorley's food for cattle - committed for trial - Abraham's 16s 6d trousers - a saving of 7d to 1s per pound - to the great joy of the noble family - extra Christmas Holiday - now lying at the London Docks, copper-bottomed - Soup for the Poor - the Borough Improvement Bill - last seen in company with - Mary, alias Moll Hacket, alias Black Moll - Mr Nye Chart played the part to perfection, in fact - Reuben Cherriman, the Dentist - J. F. Eyles, General Printer - Allano, the Clown - Canterbury Hall - Absalom Dell - Maynard's Cough Lozenges - will keep good for 10 years, even in the Indies - try a box of - Garlick's best Wall's End - Can produce a good character from his last place - Dr. King's Liver Pills - Rents! Rents!! Rents!!! - Mr L. Christian - An Act of Deep Gratitude, given away, 2,000 - no use to any one but the owner - The Brighton Sauce - N.B. be careful to have the right sort - Brighton Rifle Corps - Sudden Death - Lewes Cattle Show - Two Grand Concerts - taken up for defrauding a Countryman at hussel-cap - A. Bigge - the Mayor - J. Allfree - Assault and Robbery - Drunken Attempt at Suicide - Parish of Brighton - removed to Bath for the benefit of the air - afterwards tossed and gored several persons - A Bull in a China Shop - made a Freemason at the Grand Lodge - Mr Saunders (Blacksmith's Alms), Mr R. Cherriman - Mr Burn, jun., Mr Measor - Mr Willard - and several other highly respectable inhabitants - Remember the Poor at Christmas - A fine turtle, weighing the - creditors of Mary Jones - to be sold to the highest bidder - warranted sound wind and limb - Mr Nye Chart's Christmas Pantomime - An agreeable Young Lady with a fortune of £10,000 - fell down in St. Gile's - a total wreck, but her crew saved - The Pope's Bull - Mr Dewar - Mr R. Marston - Mr Wilson - Mr English - Mr Wheeler - universally respected - roast goose - pork chops - potatoes and greens - mild ale - gin and cloves - Dublin stout - rum and milk - cod liver oil, - Tamplin's mild - Catt's old - Parsons' good chap - out and out Cavendish - none are genuine but such as have - Brighton Examiner - evening concluded with the utmost festivity - jolly companions - won't go home till morning - now number 999 - move on - George Wight - all right - not tight - not a bit - no - no - - report - you - in - the - morn - ing - - bed quite wet - candle top of the gas light - I - sa - y - - - -.

[The remaining portion, occupying 20 sheets of large-sized letter paper, quite unintelligible at present, but when dry, we may be enabled to make out some more.]

Adverts in The Brighton Examiner, 1860, published by J. F. Eyles

Fortean Times - Sept 2013 - Crook Frightfulness

This month's Fortean Times #305 (a sort of 'paranoia special') features my exposé of the extraordinary anonymously-penned book Crook Frightfulness, self-published in 1935 by "A Victim".  In this blog post I'll present some thoughts on the book's semi-acoustical ideas.

Crook Frightfulness was first brought to my attention by the marvel Westwyrd the Bard: drum-specialist and custodian of curiousness.  For those unacquainted with the book, it's an autobiography of a man tormented by crooks who embark on a campaign of staring, ventriloquism and covert psychological harassments against the author.  The "Victim" writes of his personal hell in which everybody else is either complicit, or simply fails to notice the ventriloquist abusers who stalk him across the British colonies.  Crooks are also able to hear the Victim's thoughts by a theorised listening apparatus used with headphones (a sort of powerful stethoscope device).  Some of the antiquated colonial sentiments add an extra dimension of bizarreness.  A colleague described Crook Frightfulness as an "acoustic mystery thriller" although it's generally seen as a schizophrenic emission.  For anybody interested in sound, its psychology and its perception/misperception, it's a particularly fascinating book, as the author manages to "attain a degree of impersonal interest" (as he puts it) and proceeds to investigate the phenomena from his own practical, acoustical viewpoint.

Crook Frightfulness is split into three parts.  The first part - some 40 odd pages - begins almost like a potboiler; autobiographical sensationalism comparable to, say, Sydney Horler's 1934 exposé, London's Underworld.  Part two is written more matter-of-factly, albeit disjointedly and with heightened paranoia.  Here, the author writes of his experiences and travels around the colonies to outmanoeuvre the 'crooks'.  The third part is the 'Vital Climax' where the crooks' terrible practices are examined (involving listening apparatuses).   In FT305, it is suggested that the Victim did experience a genuine low-level persecution that left a lasting resonance.

Charles Wheatstone's 'Telephonic Concert' at the Royal Polytechnic Institution

The listening apparatus is hypothesised in general terms.  It is assumed to be able to pick up the minutest sound, akin to an amplifier, functioning in a stethoscope-like arrangement - presumably non-electric.  This acoustic method of sound conveyance conjures to mind Charles Wheatstone's ideas on acoustic transmission through solids.  Wheatstone coined the term 'microphone', not in reference to an electric transducer as we know it now, but to refer to an apparatus where sound is carried by direct transmission through solids to the ear.  In one adaptation of this to sounding bodies, at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in the 1860s Wheatstone exhibited a 'Telephonic Concert' - completely non-electric (à la tin-cans-and-string) - where thick wires coupled to musical instruments, played on a concealed lower floor, acoustically carried the sound silently through intermediate floors to a performance stage above, where the wires reconnected with the sounding boards of harps, rediffusing the sound as if by magic.  Wheatstone also visualised the invention of an ideal acoustically conductive material to stretch vast distances, to communicate from Aberdeen to London.   In Crook Frightfulness - 'A Victim' presents a visceral horror in which crooks can acoustically subjugate you in this Wheatstonian manner:

"I frequently tried to stifle the annoyance by stopping or closing my ears with my fingers, and when doing so, I rested my elbows on my knees or put my elbows upon the wooden table.  Strange to say, I found that neither of these expedients stopped or banished the sound (...)  The sound when I stopped my ears must have travelled through the wood of the floor and of the table and then through my bones to my ears!  (...)  They no doubt send sounds (by means of some instrument) to molest any intended victim who is in the same premises, or even in adjoining premises."

Likewise, crooks are said to "hear your thoughts - the sound travelling through the floor you are standing on (...) to perhaps that next room or adjoining house, to the crook listener".   Thoughts are heard by closely listening to sub-vocal articulation: "when you think (in 95 cases out of a hundred) you actually shape your words in your throat and mouth.  When we breathe through our mouth or nose it is possible for these fiends to hear your thoughts."  The Victim's theories evolve as Crook Frightfulness progresses.  Some later editions feature paste-ins where a "sound 'outfit' like the BBC" is theorised.  In spite of the book's skew-whiff nature, some of these ideas were certainly at the 'cutting edge' - an early example of widespread covert listening is seen in the early 1940s with the hidden electric microphones around Trent Park's prisoner-of-war compound to capture prisoners' conversations.

A BBC "sound 'outfit'" of the period

Last year, the writer and long-time Crook Frightfulness aficionado Phil Baker sold me a first edition of the book.  Baker was also keen to know more about the book's author.  This spurred me on to compile all the scraps of information I'd collected over the years with a view to building a profile of "Victim".

The compilation of biographical facts (gleaned from both the first and expanded editions) revealed the author was born in the East End of London, in or around 1875.  He was involved in rent collection and property.  He left Britain for New Zealand in 1924, moved to the British West Indies around 1928, and returned to Britain to settle in Aberystwyth in March 1932.  Many hours at Kew's National Archives yielded a list of some fifty or so names, gradually whittled down as each name was followed up.  The use of digital archives plays a key role in such research.

It is revealed for the first time in this month's Fortean Times that Crook Frightfulness was written by an east London estate agent named Arthur Herbert Mills.  He left Britain using the name Herbert Mills, and returned as Arthur Mills, which slightly confused matters, but further research has confirmed the connections.  His story is very interesting, and only a bare outline could be condensed into the article.

The book presents quite a sad predicament, but it's hoped that the discovery of the author's name will enable further study of the text, which charts the onset of auditory disorientation at a point in history where technology could not quite yet provide reasonable objective explanation for the phenomena.  There are a surprising number of narratives very similar to Crook Frightfulness (some early examples are examined in the article).  Today, people with these afflictions/assailments often cite James Lin's 1978 textbook Microwave Auditory Effects and Applications that superficially appears to corroborate all sonic "unseen assailment" phenomena (although, in practice, such technology is very impractical).

Anyways... It's not my intention here to delve into the arguments surrounding these phenomena (perhaps in a future posting), it is simply to examine curios and mythologies from acoustical hinterlands.  (It is worth mentioning that a semblance of 'voices' can be perceived during exposure to fluctuating white or pink noise for extended periods. This is a psychoacoustic effect: auditory pareidolia.  In one notable example, it is employed in a sound installation by U.S. sound artist Ellen Band in her Acoustic Mirage.)

The full particulars on Crook Frightfulness can be found in Fortean Times #305.

Bookophonics: Making Music with Books

The bookophone is described in an earlier post here.  It involves a paperback book and a bowing rod - preferably some kind of hollow tube, upon which the friction tone is amplified.  The character of the tone derives somewhat from the choice of bowing rod.

Playing bookophones

Last Friday, a short bookophone piece called 'Summer Song' was debuted on William English and Chris Weaver's Weavelength (part of a series of Wavelength specials touching on cassette culture).  All the sounds in this piece are created by four paperback books overdubbed together: 'Social Anthropology in Perspective,' Bird's 'Mathematical Formulae,' 'Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition,' and 'Is it Just Me or is Everything Shit?'.   The books are played with plastic and chrome bows.

It appears that temperature affects the bookophone sound.   Bookophones are generally deeply unplayable things and near-impossible to wrest a melody from, despite weeks of practice.  In the summer season, books are apparently more stubborn than usual in producing tones, demanding a more vigorous action (as heard in this piece).  This is perhaps because there is less discrepancy between the environmental warm temperature and the momentary heat caused by the bow friction(?).  Dryness certainly deadens the tones.  Anyways, it just means that in the summer, when playing the bookophone, you must really 'give it some welly'.

I can't seem to find any similar technique employed in making books 'sing', but surely over 500 years somebody must've tried something similar.  Maybe a romantic poet?   Incidentally, the very clever Maywa Denki laboratory has produced a musical electric book beating apparatus.  (Maywa Denki received exposure in the UK some years ago with a memorable appearance of a self-playing acoustic guitar on BBC One's Adam and Joe Go Tokyo.)