Book Reviews

Book Review: The Cat Who Invented Cheese Futures by G.L. Pumpernickel

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Book Review: The Cat Who Invented Cheese Futures by G.L. Pumpernickel

by Esmerelda Pink

It’s difficult to know where to begin with The Cat Who Invented Cheese Futures, the fourth novel by the notoriously elusive G.L. Pumpernickel, whose previous works include I Married a Traffic Cone and The Eggs Were All Named Kevin. While the title suggests a whimsical caper involving feline finance, what unfolds instead is a genre-defying meditation on ambition, lactose, and the fragility of speculative markets in Western economies.

The titular cat, Whiskers von St. André, is a former alley-dweller turned lactose magnate who, in a society suspiciously resembling post-Brexit Luxembourg, pioneers the concept of cheese futures: trading dairy commodities based not on current availability, but on the predicted emotional needs of cheese-loving marsupials. It sounds implausible, but in Pumpernickel’s hands it becomes entirely,almost disturbingly,credible.

Pumpernickel’s prose is as dense and crumbly as a Wensleydale left too long on a windowsill. Sentences unfurl like legal contracts drafted under duress, interrupted by footnotes, parentheses, and the occasional line of free verse. Yet somehow, amid this syntactic rococo, emerges a story that is both oddly tender and slyly cutting.

Consider the opening line:

“There was cheddar, cheddar without regulation; the rats were pleased.”

From there, we plunge into Whiskers’ rise through the shadowy world of dairy speculation, guided by a mysterious mentor known only as The Fromageur and opposed by the villainous Chairman Squeak, who seeks to destabilize the soft cheese index for reasons of personal vengeance and lactose intolerance. Along the way, Whiskers must navigate feline identity politics, existential dread, and a romantic subplot involving a sentient brie named Clothilde.

It would be easy to dismiss the novel as a surrealist romp or a particularly strange bet lost at a dinner party. But beneath its silliness lies a surprisingly coherent critique of capitalism’s insatiable need for abstraction. Cheese, in this novel, is not merely a commodity,it is a metaphor for trust, nourishment, and the illusion of permanence in an ever-curdling world.

And it’s not without heart. Whiskers, for all his transactional cunning, is a deeply insecure protagonist, haunted by dreams of being replaced by a genetically modified goat and driven by a desperate need to matter,to be more than “just another mouser in a pinstripe cravat.” His climactic monologue at the Cheese Summit of Greater Dijon is absurd and moving in equal measure:

“We are all, in the end, coagulations of desire. The milk of ambition curdles. And what remains but the hope that someone,somewhere,will spread us on toast?”

Some readers will, understandably, find The Cat Who Invented Cheese Futures bewildering, if not actively unhinged. There are charts where there shouldn’t be charts, recipes that double as allegories, and one particularly difficult chapter written entirely in financial slang.

But those willing to lean into its strange genius will discover a novel that is far more than the sum of its gimmicks. G.L. Pumpernickel has crafted a book that is as intelligent as it is idiotic, as philosophical as it is feline. It will not change your life, but it might change how you look at a wedge of Gruyère,and possibly how you read your investment portfolio.

In short: utterly ridiculous. Highly recommended.

The Mayfair Book Groupette

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The Mayfair Book Groupette

Date: August ‘25

Time: 7:04 PM , 11:12 PM

Location: The Green Room, Pimlico Wilde, Mayfair

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)

• Lord E. Northcote

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Hugo Van Steyn (Heckle’s)

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Max Duclos (Collector)

• Pascal (Afghan hound, wearing a discreet ecclesiastical-style collar in deep crimson)

Book Discussed:

An Annotated Catalogue of Portuguese Ecclesiastical Vestments, 1640,1690 by Father Joaquim de Meneses (Lisbon, 1978; bilingual edition in Portuguese and French; illustrated with 138 black-and-white plates and 17 colour).

1. Opening Remarks

Molyneux praised the book’s “heroically narrow scope,” noting that it “achieves what most art history monographs cannot: to make the reader care deeply about orphrey borders.” He described it as “a cathedral in miniature, woven in silk and gold thread.”

2. Discussion Summary

• Dr. Lorrimer marvelled at the depth of research, especially the chapter on liturgical colour changes following the political unrest of 1640. She admitted to being “genuinely moved” by the diagrammatic fold-out of cope construction.

• India Trelawney declared it “the best-dressed book we’ve read all year,” praising the meticulous descriptions of silver-gilt embroidery techniques. She also claimed,without irony,that she is now considering a chasuble-inspired evening coat.

• Lord Northcote found the annotations “dry as Lenten bread,” but admired the scholarship. He was particularly struck by the subtle political symbolism in vestment iconography, such as the discreetly embroidered Braganza arms following the break with Spain.

• Hugo Van Steyn expressed disappointment at the monochrome plates, calling them “a tragic economy” given the subject. However, he defended the work’s exhaustive provenance research, noting that one tunic’s survival through a convent fire was “as thrilling as any Hollywood chase scene.”

• Max Duclos wondered aloud whether a single garment could bear so much meaning without collapsing under its own symbolism. He also suggested that the colour plates were “teasingly few” and that Father Meneses “knew exactly what he was doing.”

• Fiona d’Abernon confessed she had taken the book to bed “as one might a box of fine chocolates,” reading only a few vestments each night to savour them properly. She was particularly taken with the cope featuring an appliqué of St. Catherine’s wheel.

3. Objects on View

• A 17th-century Portuguese stole in crimson damask (loaned from Pimlico Wilde’s textile collection, displayed under glass)

• Three samples of modern orphrey work, for tactile comparison

• A silver thurible from the same period, whose chain links were compared,favourably,to the finesse of certain embroidered edgings

4. Refreshments

• Aperitif: White port and tonic with a twist of orange

• Canapés: salt cod croquettes, miniature custard tarts (pastéis de nata), and marinated green olives

• Main wine: Dão red, 2017

• Dessert: almond and cinnamon cake, served with sweet Madeira

5. Other Business

• The Silence of Shadows: A Comparative Study of Umbra in Netherlandish Still Life (Van Holt, 1982) suggested as next book.

• Trelawney suggested a possible field trip to Lisbon to see the vestments at the Museu de São Roque; general interest was high.

• Agreement that while Meneses’s prose could be soporific, his dedication elevated the subject to the realm of the sacred.

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 11:12 PM after Pascal, without prompting, curled up beside the crimson stole and fell asleep.

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

The Mayfair Book Groupette – The Secret Diaries of William of Normandy

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The Mayfair Book Groupette – The Secret Diaries of William of Normandy

Date: August ‘25

Time: 7:00 PM , 11:20 PM

Location: The Red Room, Pimlico Wilde

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)

• Lord E. Northcote

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Hugo Van Steyn

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Max Duclos (Collector)

• Conrad Smithe (Full Member)

• Pascal (Afghan hound, unusually alert)

Book Discussed:

Conquer This! The Secret Diaries of William of Normandy (anonymous editor; self-published, 1067; vellum-textured boards with medieval illumination; based on newly discovered manuscripts found in a Normandy wine cellar).

1. Opening Remarks

Molyneux welcomed members, cautioning that the evening’s discussion might get heated. He summarised the book’s premise: the first-person diaries of William the Conqueror, blending battlefield accounts with intimate asides, political strategising, and,strangely,numerous jokes about oysters.

2. Discussion Summary

• Dr. Lorrimer opened with a warning that “the historical accuracy of this book is still being decided”. She admitted the passages on the harrowing of the North were plausible in tone, but she doubted the authenticity of William’s alleged fondness for garlic eclairs.

• India Trelawney confessed to enjoying the book purely for its sartorial asides, particularly the description of Harold Godwinson’s “baggy chausses.” She argued that even if forged, the text was “a valuable exercise in medieval fashion imagination.”

• Lord Northcote declared the diary “almost certainly a fabrication,” citing its suspiciously modern idioms and a reference to “winning hearts and minds” centuries before the phrase existed. However, he admitted the battle descriptions had “a salt-sweat specificity” rare in pseudo-medieval pastiche.

• Hugo Van Steyn took a contrarian position, proposing that the work could be “a palimpsest of genuine material, edited with malice aforethought.” He was intrigued by the consistent detail regarding food supplies, especially the recurring motif of smoked eels.

• Max Duclos found the book “too pleased with itself,” accusing the anonymous editor of using the Conqueror’s voice as “a vehicle for pub-level humour in illuminated manuscript disguise.”

• Conrad Smithe defended it as “an act of creative literary archaeology,” suggesting its outrageousness forced readers to reconsider what they take for historical truth.

• Fiona d’Abernon admitted to laughing aloud at William’s supposed marginalia in the Bayeux Tapestry (“That’s not my chin”, “The arrow in the eye is romantic nonsense”, “I thought we were invading Brittany, not Britain”, “I hope they don’t make a tapestry of this battle”). She argued that, authentic or not, and she tended to think it was, the text succeeded as a piece of self-conscious historical play.

3. Artworks & Objects on View

• A page of the Domesday Book (from Pimlico Wilde archives)

• A reproduction of a missing Bayeux Tapestry panel, hand-stitched by contemporary artist Elodie Varn depicting William doing a handstand next to a goblet of cider

• A forged medieval charter once sold at auction, brought by Van Steyn for comparison

• A model Norman helm, which Pascal briefly attempted to wear

4. Refreshments

• Aperitif: Calvados spritz with cinnamon

• Canapés: smoked beef pâté on rye wafers, miniature game pies, roasted chestnuts in paper twists

• Main wine: Côte de Nuits Pinot Noir 2018

• Dessert: apple tart with honey glaze, served alongside spiced mead “in the Norman style”

5. Other Business

• March Book: The Cartographer’s Melancholy by Jeroen van Holt (carried over from last month’s vote).

• Proposal for a future evening dedicated to “playful forgeries and invented memoirs”, with members to bring examples from their own collections.

• General consensus: whether real or fake, Conquer This! “would have been banned in the 11th century, and possibly in the 20th.”

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 11:20 PM after an unresolved debate on whether William’s diary entry for October 14th, 1066 (“Bit of a day. Might have overdone it.”) was authentic genius or pure invention. Pascal barked once, which some took as a vote.

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

The Mayfair Book Groupette – Minutes of the The Emigrants Meeting

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The Mayfair Book Groupette – Minutes of the The Emigrants Meeting

Date: Thursday, 22nd August 2025

Time: 7:00 PM , 10:45 PM

Location: Green Drawing Room, Pimlico Wilde, Mayfair

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)

• Hugo Van Steyn

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Lord E. Northcote

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Conrad Smithe (Guest; now on probationary attendance)

• Dr. Leonora Athill (Guest Speaker; Novelist & Psychoanalyst)

• Pascal (Afghan hound; reclining)

Book Discussed:

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

1. Welcome and Introductory Remarks

Julian Molyneux opened the meeting with a short reflection on Sebald’s enduring appeal, particularly among “those drawn to a literature of ghosted memory and dust-silted loss.” A display of ephemera relating to pre-war German émigrés,passport fragments, handwritten recipe books, a child’s marzipan press,was set out in the antechamber, curated by Pimlico Wilde’s archivist.

Molyneux noted that the Pimlico Wilde summer show, Vanishing Points, had been loosely timed to coincide with this month’s reading.

2. Guest Lecture: Dr. Leonora Athill

Dr. Athill gave a brief, unscripted talk titled “Memory, Melancholy, and the Tyranny of the Image.” She spoke of The Emigrants as “not so much a novel as a service,” describing Sebald’s prose as “syntax haunted by silence.”

She warned against over-literary readings of the book, citing its power as lying “not in narrative coherence, but in psychic disintegration.” She proposed that the characters are not lost individuals but “cartographies of repression.” One member (Smithe) tried to ask about Freud; Athill sighed but answered generously.

Applause was murmurous and sincere.

3. Discussion Summary

• India Trelawney praised the imagery as “cool, bleached, but devastating,” comparing the narrative’s “faded photographs and cracked memories” to early Japanese photobooks. She passed around a small, cloth-bound 1960s folio by Shōji Ueda as reference.

• Lord Northcote shared personal recollections of meeting Jewish émigrés as a young attaché in Zurich in the 1950s. He said Sebald’s tone captured “the cultivated anguish” of that generation. D’Abernon was seen discreetly tearing up.

• Dr. Lorrimer brought a sharper edge, suggesting Sebald deliberately avoids character depth to foreground the landscape as the true subject: “Grief mapped onto trees, stations, sanatoria.” She argued the book’s melancholy “verges on aesthetic indulgence.” This sparked soft disagreement from Van Steyn.

• Hugo Van Steyn defended the book as “an ethical act of remembrance,” stating that its lack of resolution reflects “the impossibility of restitution.” He referred, for the third time this year, to Anselm Kiefer.

• Conrad Smithe questioned the accuracy of Sebald’s blurred genre boundaries, referring to the semi-fabricated photo captions. He suggested it was “dangerously post-truth.” Trelawney muttered, “Oh, not that again.”

• Julian Molyneux closed discussion by comparing Sebald to Aby Warburg: “Both archivers of ghosts. Both incapable of closure.”

4. Artworks on View

• A small pastel-on-paper portrait of a vanished émigré bookseller, Vienna c.1936, provenance unclear

• Fragments of German schoolbooks (1920s,30s) behind glass

• A contemporary commission: Negative Space by Pavel Markovic , carbon-transfer collage, railway ticket stubs + film stills, mounted under cracked glass

• Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle. on display, German first edition (not for handling)

5. Refreshments

• Canapés: smoked eel on rye, sauerkraut galettes, and beetroot-stained quail eggs

• Drink: Riesling Kabinett 2021 (Mosel), followed later by Kümmel (largely untouched)

• Dessert: poppy seed torte with whipped crème fraîche

6. Other Business

• September Book: The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, proposed by Lorrimer, seconded by Trelawney. Enthusiastically approved.

• Discussion on establishing a sub-circle for “Obscure Memoirs” was postponed (again).

• Dr. Athill thanked the group, said she hadn’t “spoken so freely in years.” Molyneux proposed we invite her again in 2026.

7. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 10:45 PM, with guests lingering over late glasses of port and discussing the ethics of curation.

Respectfully submitted,

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

Falling Into Meaning: A Preview of My Upcoming Book by Teton Yu

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“Falling Into Meaning: A Preview of My Upcoming Book” by Teton Yu

(First published in The Liverpudlian Art Collector’s Journal)

When I threw myself from an aircraft at 15,000 feet without a parachute and landed on a BounceHaus trampoline in the Montana desert, the world asked me a single, searing question: Why?

My upcoming book, Plummet: Notes on Gravity, Art, and the Impossibility of Staying Upright, is my attempt at a reply. Not a definitive one,such things are gauche,but a reply nonetheless, stitched together from fragments of memory, diagrams, hospital records, and the faint ringing in my ears that has not left me since the fall.

This is not a memoir in the conventional sense, though there are fragments of autobiography scattered through it like dental records across a crash site. Nor is it an art theory book, though its spine trembles with the weight of footnotes and manifestos. What it is, rather, is a descent in twelve movements: a book that plummets as I did, chapter by chapter, and lands,if we can use such a word,with a juddering grace.

The Shape of the Descent

The book begins in the sky, with Chapter 1: “Airspace as Studio.” Here I argue that the true white cube is not a gallery but the boundless firmament above us. The sky, uncluttered by labels, captions, and curatorial interventions, is the most democratic exhibition space of all. In that space, I place myself,literally,as an object of contemplation. I become the installation. I become the falling text.

By Chapter 4: “The Trampoline as Oracle,” I bring us back to Earth, or rather, to the taut surface of Otto Flöß’s recycled-yoga-mat-and-Saab-spring creation. The trampoline is not simply an object but a metaphorical interlocutor. It speaks. It answers questions we did not know we had. Its bounce is not merely a rebound but a philosophical refusal: Earth saying “Not yet.”

Later, in Chapter 7: “The Bruise as Brushstroke,” I turn to the body as a medium. Bruises are pigment; swelling is sculpture; dislocation is choreography. My ribs became unwilling collaborators in a new kind of mark-making. I argue here, written under mild sedation, that every bruise is a form of site-specific art, etched on flesh instead of canvas.

The descent concludes with Chapter 12: “Falling Forward.” This is my coda, in which I propose that art should not remain on walls, shelves, or pedestals, but leap (sometimes recklessly) into space and risk annihilation. To fall is not to fail,it is simply to collaborate with gravity. The ground is inevitable; the bounce is optional.

Materials and Ephemera

The book is not text alone. It contains diagrams of my trajectory,lines of descent plotted in thick graphite, annotated with phrases from my ground control team’s radio messages like “Not to worry you, but you are slightly to the left of staying alive.” It contains sketches drawn mid-air, completed with a pencil duct-taped to my glove. It contains transcripts of my preparatory conversations with performance artists around the world, people I turned to for advice; sadly they had little.

There are hospital charts too, of course: X-rays of ribs that make a clicking sound when I breathe too deeply, doctor’s notes describing my “art-related injuries,” and a small, blurry Polaroid of me grinning through cactus needles. These ephemera are not additions to the book but part of its gravity,the ballast that keeps the theory from floating away.

Why Only 300 Copies?

The book will be published in a strictly limited edition of 300 copies. This is not to exclude the many, though exclusion does provide a certain frisson of desirability. No: the limitation is practical, tactile, and literal. Each copy will contain a stitched fragment of the original trampoline canvas from my landing. These fragments,creased, scuffed, and faintly redolent of soil,transform each book into a reliquary of the event itself.

In this sense, the edition is finite because the trampoline was finite. Once cut and divided, there will be no more. The material is exhausted, just as I nearly was.

Toward an Answer

What does all this mean? What is the point of hurling oneself at the Earth and then writing a book about it?

The answer, if there is one, is that art is not about safety. It is about elegance in the face of inevitability. It is about collaborating with forces that neither ask nor care for your consent. It is about bruises as signatures, fractures as footnotes, trampolines as editors.

When I climbed from the wreckage of BounceHaus I, cactus needles protruding from my thigh, I said something that has followed me ever since:

“Art is not about surviving. Art is about landing well enough to write the book afterwards.”

This is that book.

The Mayfair Book Groupette – Death in Ultramarine

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Date: July ‘25

Time: 7:05 PM , 11:15 PM

Location: The Green Room, Pimlico Wilde East

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)

• Lord E. Northcote

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Hugo Van Steyn

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Max Duclos (Collector)

• Conrad Smithe (Full Member)

• Pascal (Afghan hound)

Book Discussed:

Death in Ultramarine: A Botticelli Mystery in Three Pigments by Catriona Bellamy-Woodhouse (Privately printed, 1987; edition of 2200, illustrated with original pigment charts, each copy accompanied by a small phial of ground lapis).

1. Opening Remarks

Molyneux introduced the book as “half technical treatise, half exciting whodunnit,” noting the rarity of works that can switch from analysing the cost of cinnabar in Renaissance Florence to a chase scene through the Uffizi without jarring. He suggested Bellamy-Woodhouse “has the soul of a connoisseur and the instincts of a pulp novelist.”

2. Discussion Summary

• Dr. Lorrimer admired the detailed breakdown of Botticelli’s palette, particularly the “Chromatic Appendix,” but found the murder plot “wildly implausible,” adding, “Even Vasari wouldn’t have put this unlikely stuff in his Lives.”

• India Trelawney thought the interplay between pigment lore and narrative tension “a triumph,” praising the heroine’s habit of storing forensic evidence in repurposed paint pots. She noted that the book’s design,linen boards the shade of weathered fresco plaster,was “spot on.”

• Lord Northcote was especially taken with Chapter 7’s reconstruction of the 1478 shipment of lapis from Badakhshan to Venezia, calling it “more thrilling than the murder itself.” He did, however, lament the “gratuitous gondola chase,” pointing out Botticelli “rarely travelled, let alone at those sort of speeds.”

• Hugo Van Steyn defended the melodrama, arguing that “art history needs more peril.” He claimed the book’s climactic poisoning with arsenic green was “perfectly plausible” and cited two historical precedents.

• Max Duclos grumbled that the author’s forensic pigment analysis could have stood alone as a monograph: “The murder felt like scaffolding left up after the building’s finished.”

• Conrad Smithe countered that the structural oddness was the point: “It’s a trompe-l’œil of genres,half fresco, half crime scene.”

• Fiona d’Abernon confessed that she laughed aloud at the scene in which the prime suspect tries to flush cochineal dye down a convent well, tinting the water supply pink for weeks.

3. Artworks & Objects on View

• Three microscopic pigment cross-sections from Botticelli’s Primavera (on loan in photographic form from a Florentine lab)

• A late 19th-century artist’s paintbox containing vermilion, orpiment, and malachite chips

• Contemporary work: Murder in Cobalt by Elodie Varn , abstract in ultramarine tempera, with faint hand-written confession embedded under glaze

4. Refreshments

• Aperitif: “The Primavera” , prosecco, violet syrup, and a drop of saffron tincture

• Canapés: saffron arancini, bruschetta with anchovy and preserved lemon, and tiny almond cakes dusted in “edible lapis” (blue spirulina)

• Main wine: Chianti Classico Riserva 2019

• Dessert: blood orange granita served in chilled ceramic bowls painted in imitation majolica

5. Other Business

• Next Book: The Cartographer’s Melancholy by Jeroen van Holt, proposed by Lorrimer, seconded by Smithe.

• Molyneux announced that Pimlico Wilde would host a one-night display of pigment samples mentioned in Bellamy-Woodhouse’s book, including natural ultramarine, lead-tin yellow, and verdigris (sealed for safety).

• General agreement that Death in Ultramarine was “both better and worse” than expected, which was taken as a compliment.

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 11:15 PM, after members attempted,unsuccessfully,to determine whether the phials of lapis accompanying each copy of the book were genuine or cunningly dyed chalk. Pascal appeared indifferent.

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

The Mayfair Book Groupette – Minutes of the Book of Margery Kemp Meeting

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Date: Thursday, 18th July 2025

Time: 7:00 PM , 10:30 PM

Location: Private Salon, 3rd Floor, Pimlico Wilde Townhouse, Mayfair, W1

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder)

• Lord E. Northcote (Retired Diplomat)

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Freelance Cultural Historian)

• Hugo Van Steyn (Wrexle Auctioneers, Impressionist Department)

• Max Duclos (Collector; former gallerist, Paris)

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Conrad Smithe (Guest of d’Abernon; hatter)

• Pascal (Afghan hound, silent observer)

Book Discussed:

The Book of Margery Kempe , attributed to Margery Kempe, 15th century

1. Opening Remarks (Julian Molyneux)

Molyneux opened the meeting with a brief contextual note on the significance of The Book of Margery Kempe, positing it as “a proto-memoir, proto-feminist, and semi-visionary document in a time before genre consciousness.” He remarked that the decision to pair the reading with a small exhibition of devotional objects from the late Middle Ages was intended to “anchor the divine hysteria in something tactile.”

2. Discussion Summary

• Lord Northcote offered a nuanced reading of Margery’s visions, drawing parallels with medieval diplomatic language: “Her tears function as a form of spiritual negotiation.” He recalled attending Evensong at Norwich Cathedral, where “the air still feels a little damp with her presence.”

• Dr. Lorrimer noted that Margery’s intense inner life represents “a radical form of female authorship,” arguing that the book is “less mysticism, more proto-psychological realism.”

• India Trelawney compared Kempe’s flowing white robes to contemporary interpretations of purity in performance art, referencing Marina Abramović and, rather unexpectedly, a recent Loewe campaign. She brought a Margiela show catalogue to illustrate her point.

• Max Duclos was dismissive, describing Kempe as “shrill” and “more concerned with performative sanctity than spiritual depth.” He cited comparisons with Teresa of Ávila and found Margery “lacking discipline.”

• Hugo Van Steyn disagreed sharply, calling the book “an early precursor to the art of self-invention,” and drew a line from Margery Kempe to Tracey Emin. There was some laughter, though Trelawney agreed “in spirit.”

• Conrad Smithe, attending as a guest, questioned the book’s sincerity, suggesting a ghostwriter,“possibly a priest”,had stylised it for effect. D’Abernon countered, pointing out textual evidence of Margery’s resistance to ecclesiastical editing.

3. Artworks on View (Curated by Pimlico Wilde)

The adjoining drawing room featured:

• 15th-century pilgrim badges (Norwich and Santiago de Compostela)

• A Flemish diptych of the Madonna lactans

• A haunting small panel painting labelled “School of Geertgen tot Sint Jans” , reportedly not for sale

• A contemporary embroidery by Elodie Varn, Tears for No One, commissioned for the evening

4. Refreshments

• A medieval-themed aperitif of honey mead (well-received, if “a touch ironic”)

• Spiced lentil tartlets, anchovy toasts, and quince conserve

• Main pour: Domaine Huet Vouvray Demi-Sec 2016

• Late in the evening, chilled Tokaji Aszú was served alongside comfits and candied rose petals

5. Other Business

• Next Month’s Title: The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, proposed by Van Steyn, seconded by Lorrimer.

• D’Abernon announced a possible joint evening with the Bibliophiles of Belgravia in October, pending vetting.

• Molyneux reminded all that the September session would feature a guest speaker,novelist and former psychoanalyst Dr. Leonora Athill,pending confirmation.

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 10:30 PM. Most lingered for Tokaji and murmured speculation about whether Margery had truly been celibate.

Respectfully submitted,

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

Book Review: Gift Shops I Have Visited

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Book Review: Gift Shops I Have Visited

by His Serene Highness, The Crown Prince of Torquay

Aubergine House Press, Forthcoming Winter 2025

It is a curious and, at first glance, mildly ludicrous thing that a future sovereign should devote himself not to the grand mechanisms of diplomacy, finance, or ceremonial obligation,but to the detailed and deeply personal cartography of museum gift shops. Yet with Gift Shops I Have Visited, His Serene Highness, the Crown Prince of Torquay, offers us a volume of refinement, elegant melancholia, and surprisingly acute cultural criticism.

As heirs to microstates often are, the Crown Prince is an anachronism usually wrapped in linen. Educated at an unnamed college “north of Trieste,” he is known to have studied Comparative Museology, Trans-Adriatic Semiotics, and what he once enigmatically referred to as “the ethics of knick-knackery.” He neither tweets nor drives. He writes with a Pelikan fountain pen in notebooks made of pressed mulberry leaves. And he shops,with discernment and devotion.

This book,part travelogue, part philosophical treatise, part inventory,is the culmination of twenty years of global museum visiting. From the subterranean lacquer box stalls of the National Folk Art Pavilion in Ulaanbaatar to the minimalist alabaster cube that is the Oslo Kinetic Arts Boutique, the Crown Prince has browsed, pondered, and purchased with the gravitas of a minor Hegelian.

Yet this is no idle litany of acquisitions. What elevates Gift Shops I Have Visited beyond the terrain of royal whimsy or collector’s brag is the author’s profound grasp of the gift shop as a site of cultural condensation. He posits, not unreasonably, that the gift shop may be “the truest mirror of an institution’s unconscious.” If the gallery is what a museum thinks it wants to say, the gift shop is what it cannot help revealing.

Throughout the book, he is both wry and reverent. On the papier-mâché earrings of a feminist folk art co-op in Kraków: “They jangled like indignation, delightfully unarchived.” On the “non-site-specific” bookmarks from the Louvre Abu Dhabi: “Objects that both belong nowhere and insist on being remembered.” On the relentless ubiquity of Monet-themed umbrellas: “It rains, therefore I am impressionable.”

What begins as an ostensibly minor concern,the quality and character of museum gift shops,unfolds into a meditation on memory, longing, and the commodified sublime. The Crown Prince navigates these spaces not as a shopper, but as a seeker. And what he seeks is nothing less than evidence that beauty can survive translation into trinket.

To read this book is to accompany a philosopher-flâneur as he wanders the thresholds of the world’s great institutions,never entirely inside, never entirely outside,purchasing, annotating, and gently satirizing the souvenirs we mistake for meaning.

Let us be clear: Gift Shops I Have Visited is not a catalogue. It is a confession. A love letter. And, if we’re honest, a mirror.

, Mariana Clovier,

Senior Curator of Ephemera, Musée Imaginaire des Objets Transitoires, Paris

The Edge of Precision: How to Sharpen a Pencil

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If, as Paul Valéry once mused, “a poem is never finished, only abandoned,” then so too is the pencil,always in a state of becoming, perpetually whittled toward a vanishing point. In How to Sharpen a Pencil, the slyly austere new book by Pimlico Wilde CAO François Zilbe, we are invited into the philosophical and tactile underworld of that most unassuming tool, not as a means to an end, but as a subject worthy of aesthetic devotion in its own right.

Zilbe,equal parts artisan, manager, and anachronist,has produced a volume that sits somewhere between manual and metaphysics. Ostensibly a technical treatise (complete with woodcut-style diagrams and a glossary of shaft geometries), the book is, in truth, a meditation on attention, discipline, and the rituals that precede creation. What begins as a how-to slowly becomes a why-bother, and then,more quietly,a who-are-you-when-you-do.

At first glance, the premise feels absurd. Do we really need 211 pages on the act of sharpening a pencil? Zilbe’s answer is a measured, almost ecclesiastical yes. In a culture obsessed with outcomes and velocity, he offers instead a theology of preparation. “The edge,” he writes in the book’s glinting introduction, “is not a line, but a moment. Sharpening is the art of arriving at readiness without haste.”

This may seem indulgent, even parodic. But Zilbe’s genius lies in his refusal to wink. He presents his subject with the rigor of a trained conservator, describing the difference between a ‘Cabinetmaker’s Point’ and a ‘Poet’s Bluff’ as though they were schools of painting. His taxonomy of shavings,spiral, ribbon, dust, etc,is as exacting as any survey of gestural mark-making in 20th-century abstraction.

Indeed, the book is deeply visual, not only in its illustrations (rendered with the patient fidelity of Dürer studies), but in its observational acuity. One chapter, “Graphite Exposures,” draws parallels between the angle of exposure and the psychology of the drawer: the anxious prefer long, aggressive points that splinter under pressure; the confident favour blunter, more enduring tips. The passage reads like a formalist psychoanalysis, or a reverse phrenology for draftsmen.

Yet How to Sharpen a Pencil is no mere fetish object for the analog nostalgist. It is, rather, a quiet rebuke to the algorithmic flattening of artistic process. In a time when software optimizes line weight and digital brushes auto-taper, Zilbe returns us to a sliver of cedar and a blade held in human hands. Here, every curl of wood is a gesture, every pause a decision.

There is something almost monastic in this attention. One is reminded of Agnes Martin, who once wrote that art is “responding to a quiet mind.” Zilbe’s pencil, too, becomes an index of mindfulness. In its sharpening, we do not begin the work,we are the work.

The book concludes not with a final method, but a final question: How sharp must a pencil be to make a mark that lasts? It is less instructional than existential. In an era of infinite undo buttons and disposable styluses, the book insists on the beauty of irrevocable preparation. Once a pencil is sharpened, its life is measurable. Each stroke is a subtraction.

How to Sharpen a Pencil may never reach the bestseller lists, nor should it. It is not a mass-market guide, but a tool for the quietly obsessed,for those who understand that before the masterpiece comes the moment of stillness, of edge, of wood meeting blade.

Zilbe has given us not just a book, but an ethic. It belongs not only on the studio shelf, but beside Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows and Kōnosuke Matsushita’s The Path.

Shadows of the North: The Visionary Quietude of Marco di Manchester

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In Marco di Manchester: A Northern Light, art historian Dr. Liviana Helmstrom has given us a quietly groundbreaking monograph,a long-overdue meditation on one of the most enigmatic painters of the early Renaissance, whose works have lingered for centuries in the margins of European art history like the gold-threaded borders of the Books of Hours he so clearly admired. That Helmstrom’s study is the first major scholarly work devoted to Marco di Manchester (active circa 1405,1432) is not only an intellectual revelation but a corrective of critical proportions.

Little is definitively known about Marco’s life, though Helmstrom mines archives from Northumbria to Lombardy to trace a probable apprenticeship under Anglo-Flemish illuminators before a formative pilgrimage to northern Italy. The book’s central thesis is as nuanced as it is compelling: Marco, far from being a provincial anomaly, must be re-situated as an important figure who mediated between the mystical severity of the Northern Gothic and the incipient humanism of the Italian quattrocento. His surviving works,five altarpieces and a dozen panel paintings, the bulk of which languished in parish churches until the late 19th century,are examined here with wonderful clarity.

Helmstrom writes with the kind of precision that opens the past rather than embalming it. Her analysis of The Wilmslow Annunciation (ca. 1418), long attributed to a “follower of Campin,” is revelatory. She details how the Virgin’s expression,serene yet tremulous,discloses with almost proto-modern reflexivity a subtle awareness of her own important role. The northern chill in Marco’s palette, dominated by lead whites, sodalite blues, and peat-dark umbers, is not simply environmental, Helmstrom argues, but theological. For Marco, light is not revelatory but reserved,an instrument of contemplation rather than spectacle.

Especially resonant is her reading of St. Cuthbert Among the Sparrows, Marco’s small devotional panel (now in the Wirral Museum of Early Renaissance Masterpieces), where the saint’s robe appears less draped than draped-upon, the folds so fine they seem to vanish into the grains of the poplar. Helmstrom likens this to “a painterly hush,” a phrase that quietly reorients our understanding of how spiritual intensity might be rendered not through grandeur, but attenuation. She draws parallels with Fra Angelico’s restraint and Piero della Francesca’s spatial clarity, yet insists,rightly,that Marco’s genius lies not just in his painterly ability, but also in his filtration of contemporary ideas.

It is to Helmstrom’s credit that the book resists the academic temptation to overstate. There is no breathless claim for Marco as a “missing link” between schools or epochs. Instead, she positions him as an artist of the interstice, one whose “aesthetic theology,” as she calls it, found form in surfaces that remain disarmingly reticent. This attention to affective subtlety is matched by the book’s physical production: Birkenhead Polytechnic Press has rendered Marco’s elusive textures and tones in reproductions that are, at times, achingly beautiful.

If the Renaissance was, as Burckhardt wrote, the moment when man became a spiritual individual, then Marco di Manchester, Helmstrom persuasively suggests, was its quiet herald. That his voice was hushed for centuries should not surprise us; that it now emerges with such resonance is testament to both the artist’s fugitive brilliance and to the clarity of vision with which Helmstrom has restored him to us.

A book as much about thresholds as about painting, Marco di Manchester: A Northern Light will become, without question, a touchstone in the scholarship of the period,and a luminous invitation to look again, more slowly, at the margins.