Today's find: Mörder Guss Reims: The Gustave Leberwurst Manuscript (1981)

I have to leave the house sometime. I sent myself downtown to pick up more black ink and paper for loon prints. On impulse, I leapt onto the #6 bus instead of the homeward vessel and rode out along Quadra through a sudden pelting rainstorm. Riding the bus suits my habitual (and currently intensified) feelings of displacement and liminality.

I got out at Royal Oak Shopping Centre, a disorientingly centreless mass of self-spawning plazas.

The attraction of the Royal Oak is the Smart Bookshop, a longstanding proper old-fashioned used bookstore. In the literature section, this unassuming black hardcover caught my eye:



I opened Mörder Guss Reims: The Gustave Leberwurst Manuscript (1981) to a random page and found a curiously over-annotated poem in German. I only glanced at the German, and I could not make sense of it, but the ratio of annotation to poem had a real Pale Fire shimmer. Sincere? In-? Either way, desirable.



I thought: yes, this is clearly the book I came in here for. I paid my $5 and left with it tucked into my bag.

I did not work out the trick, because I did not try sounding out the cod German. (Try it!)

Just now I web-searched and found out what sort of artefact this is. It is a remarkably poker-faced object in both design and presentation. However, the copyright page gives the game away:



Macaronic literature! Facetiae!

I do think this John Hulme must be a Nabokov fan. I have not yet been able to find out anything about him online, except that this seems to have been his Own Particular Genre. (I do not think he can be the contemporary author/director of the same name, since he would have had to publish this book at the age of 12.)

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