It's always pot luck. I once bought some Dickens which described itself as 'Used - Good'. When it arrived in the post and I opened the dog-eared binding, the first pages were illuminated - in squirls of orange crayon. And so were the next pages. And the rest of the book. The unexpected perils of online shopping.
I managed to get a refund because, to cap it all, it wasn't the book I'd ordered.
But sometimes Amazon turns up even more unlikely objects. Business cards or paper clippings once used to mark pages, forgotten in spine of the book. An unwritten postcard print of a medieval painting of a saint's life. I buy some pretty random books, I admit.
My most recent purchase gave me a pleasant surprise, because it bore a great bard's name on an gummy old school presentation leaf: 'S. For Distinction in the Study of Literature'. I had admired his works, and to hold a book once belonging to him was like, for a pilgrim, touching a sacred relic.
Yet unlike a pilgrim my interest was not cured. The second surprise came as I leafed my way through the book. As with long lost possessions, which you find when you least expect to, what met my eyes was certainly not what I expected.
Lost (or preserved) between the pages was a tattered rag of vellum, brown-beige, and torn at some point in its seemingly long history from a greater volume of poetry. Its contents I deciphered using notes from a calligraphy lecture I half-attended.
Whan that somres monthes gaan to enden
been sunne and rain in ilke part y-senden
and swellen berries y-liken sely monkes.
The ferst that green and in the briar y-sunk is
goes rood as sweet licour ere it goes blacke
as col that ye find y-hiden in the sacke
... ... ... ...
... ... ... [e]verichon.
Than wolden we the beres black goon picken.
With deepe pailes and with hendes rood
wolden we swinken about the meadwe brood.
Oo for the paile, oo for the murrye lippe
til hendes full we to the berne wold skippe.
At night we clapped hem in the berne to
but ere day came the beres nere namo.
He is a fool that bringe to his hous
in a paile of beres a shrewe litel mous!
The style was Chaucer's for sure, and it reminded me of a certain passage in the Canterbury Tales which I couldn't put my finger on. But the poetry itself was perhaps a little sloppy, vernacular; and it wasn't helped by the stain which blotted most of the seventh and eighth stanzas, which no daylight or obvious solution would elucidate.
There was something uncanny about these lines, something oddly familiar, something reminiscent of the lines by S., the polymath whose school book was in my hands.
Late August given sun and rain...
The likeness was there, right down to the final stanza, as I looked from piece to piece. The 'mous' even made an appearence, in altered form. Of course, the potato was anomolous, anachronistic - a nice touch by the poet, or omission by the forger, whichever it was.
Of eggs and chickens: had I outed the greatest literary heist? Had the young S. descended to forgery, or had he cribbed his most famous work from a throw-away riddle by a medieval clerk?
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