Books

The Frolic of the Red-Bearded Foxes (1543)

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The Frolic of the Red-Bearded Foxes (1543)

A Lighthearted Novel And A Fashionable Frenzy

In the spring of 1543, Pimlico Wilde published one of the more curious successes of Tudor literature: The Frolic of the Red-Bearded Foxes, a humorous novel recounting the misadventures of England’s earliest fox hunters—who, according to author Edmund Lamplugh, were “no more competent than a sack of turnips on horseback.”

Though nominally about sport, the novel is really a parade of comic mishaps: hounds that chase laundry instead of quarry, hunters who mistake each other for foxes, and one unforgettable scene in which an entire hunt is lost for two days because everyone is too polite to admit they’ve taken a wrong turning.

The Princess’s Unexpected Approval

The novel might have vanished into pleasant obscurity had it not found an admirer in the King’s youngest daughter, Princess Mary-Elizabeth (a historical footnote who appears in practically no official chronicle but is mentioned constantly in scandalous ones). She was given a copy by her music tutor, who believed that she needed something “of improving character.”

To the surprise of the court, the princess adored it. She read whole passages aloud at table, often dissolving into laughter so intense she spilled her wine. Her favourite episode, which she quoted repeatedly to anyone who stood still long enough, concerned a hunter who leapt triumphantly over a hedge only to land in a pig wallow. She referred to him thereafter as “Sir Muckington.”

Word spread. If the princess liked it, everyone must at least pretend to.

Within a week, half the ladies-in-waiting carried copies tucked into their sleeves. Within a month, courtiers began dropping entirely unnatural references to fox hunting into conversation. One duke who had never been nearer to a fox than a tapestry proudly insisted he “had always admired their vulpine dignity.”

The Fashion Frenzy

The princess’s enthusiasm led to an unexpected—and for foxes, unfortunate—trend. A throwaway joke in chapter thirteen about “the gentleman of fashion who wore a waistcoat of fox fur so lifelike it frightened his own horse” lit the fuse. Courtiers, eager to ingratiate themselves with the princess, decided fox-hair garments were tres chic.

Merchants responded with alarming speed. For roughly three months in 1543, London saw a fever of fox-fur fashions:

• Fox-fur cuffs

• Fox-fur riding cloaks that shed constantly, leaving a molting trail through palace corridors

• One ambitious but short-lived attempt at a fox-hair codpiece

The princess herself wore a modest fox-fur trim on her sleeves, prompting an uproar of imitation so frenzied that Parliament briefly considered regulating “excessive vulpine ornamentation.”

Reactions and Consequences

Hunters adored the fad; foxes, presumably, did not. The royal gamekeeper complained that the countryside was “in a state of uproar, with gentlemen galloping after anything vaguely reddish, including chickens, hats, and at one point a terrified monk.”

The clergy attempted to denounce the fashion from pulpits, but were repeatedly interrupted by parishioners asking whether fox fur was allowed on Sundays.

Edmund Lamplugh, the author, was reportedly bewildered by the entire affair. In a letter to his publisher, Pimlico Wilde he wrote:

“I did not intend to influence the nation’s taste in garments. I merely wished to show that the English are at their most English when hopelessly lost in a field.”

The End of the Craze

The trend faded as swiftly as it rose. A particularly hot August did most of the work. Fox fur, as it turns out, is best suited to animals living in burrows rather than aristocrats attending banquets.

Still, The Frolic of the Red-Bearded Foxes remains a delightful curiosity: a novel that made a princess laugh, a nation sweat under unnecessary pelts, and Pimlico Wilde another small fortune.

The Chancellor’s Wig: A Cautionary Tale of Satire, Statecraft, and Excessive Grooming (1458)

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The Chancellor’s Wig: A Cautionary Tale of Satire, Statecraft, and Excessive Grooming (1458)

An estimated Account of the Most Inadvisable Novel of 1458

In the year 1458, Pimlico Wilde published a novel that sent shockwaves through the royal court: The Chancellor’s Wig, or The Scandalous Chronicle of a Very Important Man’s Very Silly Hair. Though written as harmless satire, the book nearly led to charges of sedition, several interrogations, and at least one panicked barber fleeing by moonlight.

The Premise

The novel tells the story of a fictional statesman known only as “The Most Honourable Lord of Forelocks,” a thinly veiled portrait of the actual Lord Chancellor. It chronicles his obsession with maintaining an increasingly elaborate, gravity-defying wig that becomes so enormous and rigidly lacquered that it:

  • prevents him from sitting in low doorways,
  • requires two attendants to support it during long speeches,
  • and accidentally knocks over a bishop during a state procession.

The satire is sharp and symbolically exposes the Chancellor’s vanity and preoccupation with appearances at a time when the kingdom faced real troubles.

One of the novel’s most notorious scenes describes the Chancellor’s attempt to bow before the monarch, resulting in the wig catching on a chandelier and suspending him briefly like a hooked trout. Readers recognised the incident as an exaggerated version of a real mishap at court the previous winter.

Why It Caused Outrage

The Lord Chancellor, a man famously allergic to mockery, interpreted the novel as a direct attack on his dignity. His official statement described the book as:

“A malicious fabrication intending to destabilize the realm through hairstyle-based calumny.”

Certain members of the council argued that allowing the novel to circulate set a dangerous precedent for “mockery as political discourse,” a phrase so alarming it was repeated at least six times in one meeting.

A list of suspects was drawn up and included:

  • a barber who had recently trimmed the Chancellor’s nape “with suspicious enthusiasm,”
  • a clerk who laughed too hard upon hearing the title,
  • and a lady-in-waiting who admitted she “quite liked the book.”

The barber vanished the next morning. The clerk pretended to have a chronic coughing problem to disguise laughter. The lady-in-waiting produced an alibi that scholars still admire for its creativity.

The Turning Point

Just as the situation seemed destined to end with at least one beheading, the Chancellor’s wife was shown a copy. After reading it privately, she remarked to her husband:

“If you do not wish to be mocked for your wig, you might consider wearing one less mockable.”

This simple, fatal sentence diffused the entire crisis. The Chancellor, full of marital indignation, ordered the matter closed.

Within a month, the Chancellor’s wig became modest, symmetrical, and sensible.

The Cultural Impact

Far from disappearing, the novel flourished; copies passed from hand to hand with the furtive delight usually reserved for banned romances. Clerks annotated it, monks copied it, and at least one minor noble reportedly learned to read simply to enjoy it.

Political historians now credit The Chancellor’s Wig with helping establish the idea that public officials, regardless of hairstyle, could be criticised through fiction without the world ending. It became a model for later satirical works and inadvertently encouraged the slow, uneven development of political self-awareness in English governance.

On the Proper Heat and Humble Conduct Required in the Baking of Cakes -by King Alfred the Great (circa 892)

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On the Proper Heat and Humble Conduct Required in the Baking of Cakes -by King Alfred the Great circa 892

Year: c. 892

Length: 47 pages

This short but sternly instructive volume, believed to have been written shortly after the famous incident in which Alfred, distracted by matters of state, allowed a peasant woman’s cakes to scorch, lays out the king’s uncompromising rules for achieving a morally upright cake.

Alfred devotes an entire chapter to the “Correct Temperature of Regal Ovens,” insisting the fire must be “hot enough to inspire diligence yet cool enough to preserve humility.” He further outlines the appropriate posture when checking one’s cakes (“a slight bow of apology to the memory of past failures”) and includes a table of baking times depending on the baker’s level of contrition.

A commonly quoted line:

“Let no king, reeve, nor common man turn his back upon a baking cake, lest he learn again the bitterness of distraction.”

Though circulation was limited, the text survived in scattered monastic copies. Culinary historians agree it is the earliest known attempt by a reigning monarch to legislate kitchen temperature.

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.

From the upcoming Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

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From the upcoming Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

To be published by Pimlico Wilde Publishing, the Handbook of Lesser-known Artists tells the stories of those less well-known artists who have not been favoured by the media coverage given to their contemporaries.

The Obscure Legacy of Aurelia Mendez: The Artist Who Painted with Mould

Art history, while vast, has always held blind spots for the unconventional. One such overlooked figure is Aurelia Mendez (1911–1984), a Spanish-born artist who abandoned pigment, ink, and charcoal in favor of a medium as unpredictable as it was reviled: living mould. At the height of mid-century modernism, when the art world clamored for purity of form and surface, Mendez quietly cultivated growth and decay on her canvases, transforming microscopic life into macroscopic beauty.

The Unlikely Origins

Born in Salamanca to a family of apothecaries, Mendez developed an early fascination with the invisible. Her father’s herbal remedies and glass jars of spores and tinctures became her first teachers in the properties of organic matter. “Colour,” she once said, “is already in the earth; we only need to coax it forth.” After studying chemistry briefly at the University of Madrid, she transferred to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where she was trained in traditional painting.

By the late 1930s, Mendez had begun experimenting with biological growth on untreated linen, placing damp cloths in shallow wooden boxes and introducing selected spores. She nurtured the organisms with carefully measured light, temperature, and humidity, “painting” through conditions rather than direct mark-making. What emerged were lush, variegated spreads of green, yellow, black, and deep crimson, blooming into organic compositions that changed daily as the mould matured.

Scandal and Obscurity

When Mendez exhibited her first series, El Jardín Silencioso (“The Silent Garden”), in Madrid in 1941, the reaction was immediate and violent. Many viewers recoiled at the smell and the suggestion of contamination. Several works were confiscated by local health authorities. Critics dismissed her practice as “perverse,” and her refusal to sterilize or stabilize the pieces doomed them to literal decomposition.

Yet among a small circle of avant-garde thinkers, Mendez’s work was recognized as revolutionary. The philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, a family acquaintance, praised her for “making visible what we pretend not to see: the soft empire of decay that rules all things.” But his support could not shield her from the conservatism of Franco-era Spain, where her work was viewed as a political affront. She relocated to Lisbon in 1946, working in obscurity while continuing her experiments.

Technique and Philosophy

Mendez believed that art should embody the same mortality as its creator. She refused to use preservatives, accepting that her works would eventually consume themselves. Each piece was a collaboration between human intention and microbial agency, with results that could never be fully predicted. Her notebooks from the 1950s detail hundreds of “recipes,” from cultivating Penicillium for icy blue blooms to introducing strains of Aspergillus for velvety blacks.

She often described her practice in agricultural terms. “I plant my canvas,” she wrote, “and I must accept whatever harvest comes.” The process could take weeks or months, with some compositions collapsing into slime before they could be exhibited.

Rediscovery and Legacy

It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when the conceptual art movement had softened the art world’s resistance to ephemeral and nontraditional media, that Mendez gained belated recognition. A 1979 retrospective in Paris, The Living Canvas, shocked and fascinated critics, even though half the works were already in various states of decomposition. She died five years later, largely unaware of the influence her ideas would exert on bio-artists of the 21st century.

Today, Mendez is regarded as a precursor to the likes of Anicka Yi and Eduardo Kac, who integrate living systems into art. Very few of her works survive, and those that do are maintained in sterile laboratory conditions, frozen in mid-bloom. Museums struggle with the paradox of exhibiting art that was never meant to last, but Mendez’s words resonate as a rejoinder: “To preserve my work is to betray it. It was born to disappear.”

Pimlico Wilde publishing division launch party – great success, except for the theft

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Pimlico Wilde publishing division launch party – great success, except for the theft

The launch party for the new Pimlico Wilde publishing division was a relatively quiet affair, with no more than three noise abatement orders issued during the seventeen hour event that welcomed stars of the fine art, publishing and sports world to our little townhouse/gallery/emporium in central London. It was only slightly overshadowed by the theft of Lady Hannibal’s Gold and diamond-encrusted straw, which she takes everywhere nowadays to use instead of the paper straws that turn to papier-mâché after two sucks.

Shannon Drifte, author of the North American best seller How to find Oil in almost any back garden broke the world record for number of books signed in one sitting, breaking the record set in Iraq by Hekan Al Bitte’s book Buy this book or get shot by the secret police. Managing director Rominee Plantonane announced the first roster of books that would be published by the imprint: “We have won the bidding war to publish QWERTY is not a Word, the new Scrabble-based murder mystery set in the high stakes world of both online Scrabbling and the Monte Carlo Scrabblathon by A.K.Seepe. And we have the rights to the upcoming catalogue raisonné of Bangladeshi micro-sculptor B.P. Rohingya whose work is so small that none of it has ever actually been seen. Not to mention tomes that will be the talk of London and New York, like 12th century Anglo-Welsh Duelling Customs and Footballers I have had my photo taken with.”

Writers with interesting book proposals in genres from Religion to Murder mysteries, Health to Sport or frankly any subject except for serial killer memoirs should get in touch.

We cannot publish any photographs from the event until the police deem the location is no longer a crime scene. If anyone is offered a gold and diamond straw they are asked to contact the police.