Take a look at the lawman Beating up the wrong guy.

 It's in Life on Mars? that,

    Lennon's on sale again. 

 

And now, it would appear, so am I. Here, 

E-Bay, The Perfect Book 

 

It's remarkable what happens once books go out of print. Prices sky rocket to £4.38 plus p&p. There's always somebody ready to cash in.

Once in a while I google myself - vanity, vanity, all of it vanity- but it's not often there's anything new to be found about such a low profile poet.

It's just slightly saddening that I never took any money for those books and yet someone else would. They are cheap to get printed and I gladly gave them away to good homes. So the e-Bay seller never paid the £5 it says the book cost on the back. I have only the vaguest of ideas of how it might be in Guildford with a book by Maggie Sawkins, also of this parish.

But good luck to them. It might not be that the book was unappreciated. It could conceivably be that a genuine poetry lover has died and their family have less interest in this obscurest of titles.

But there is no need to pay £7.08 for it.

Yes, it is officially out of print but I could probably find you a copy if you wanted one.   

--

Much more dispiriting is what reaction 'twins theory', at Strange Fowl gets when it gets any.

For most it is unthinkable, 'bizarre' and almost, one might think, disloyal to the point of insurrectionist. But we're not like that at all. Mr. Curtis and I are entirely compos mentis and only ask if our modest proposal is disprovable.

Strange Fowl continues to add up, for me, and there are those Oxfordians, conspiracy theorists and much more of a host of those who don't believe in William Shakespeare that I ever imagined. And, distressingly, really, it is the likes of them from who we get some support.

They are welcome, of course. Few campaigns turn away any followers except we are exiled in mainstream, we are among the Stratfordian faithful and have nothing more dangerous to offer than some adjustment in Shakespeare's biography to the number of children he may or may not have been the biological father of.

And yet there is more in the news about the authorship question and The Real Shakespeare: Emilia Bassano Willoughby by Irene Coslet who,

comes to Shakespeare as an expert in feminism. She has studied feminism for 20 years and has been involved in the promotion of gender equality in multiple organisations and countries around the world. 

and I'm impressed that she does. But her reading of Shakespeare makes her a perfect fit for the tendency identified by Jonathan Bate that we all make Shakespeare into who we would like him to be, as per Virginia Woolf,

that all Shakespearean biography is veiled autobiography.

 

I'm not at all confident that modest proposals, carefully threaded together by gently thoughtful people, are loud enough to be heard any more. That is by no means a reason to give up on them but it might be a reason to put it in place once and for all and let the world go to bad if that's what it is intent on doing.