Moebius & The Airtight Garage: No. 4 … Ink lightly into that dark night

Inking is a physical performance in which the extreme polarity of the marks being made allows little room for fuzzy thinking or clumsy action. One must be precise and accurate whether one's moves are bold or delicate, and in the latter mode, Moebius was the undisputed champion. Not many inkers can keep things so quiet yet energetic, as Moebius did when he was in the mood.

Here’s page 30 of The Airtight Garage and after 34 years, it still makes this inker seethe with a happy envy. It is a performance governed by a simple rule (in addition to the 3 Prime Directives of camera-ready, eye-pleasing black & white line art):

4. Toujours délicat — always delicate!

This page is an homage to the expressive powers of a crowquill nib handled with care. Each panel retreats backwards in point-of-view, shedding detail but always staying crisp and balanced and detailed at the precise level needed to maintain continuity and attract the eye further. The breakup of white space is completely interlocked with the lines, the spotting is perfect — in fact, there is little one can express with words to do justice to this performance.

Note the petillance in panel 2; the woman’s hair is an optical eye-sink which perfectly balances the spotting above her. Also note that on this page, Moebius tackles one of the great technical challenges of any inker: realistically rendering disparate textures in the same page. In panel 1 we have the delicate flesh of a woman (more about that in a moment), the short-napped fur of her jacket collar, the rougher masculine flesh of the hand pointing to her, the burned edges of paper and even the brass screen of a hash pipe with ashes in it. In the next panels we have hair, pearls,, shiny fabrics, a puff ball of sorts and even smoke.

Nothing makes an inker sweat harder than tackling lots of different textures in one rendering, it requires careful choices in choosing one's marking system so that the entire assembly makes sense in the end. If, for example, one over-renders the female’s face, then everything else usually needs more rendering to stay in tune and this may skew the tonal design. If the cigarette smoke had been crosshatched (as Moebius does on other pages of the AG) then the fabric it floats over may need more rendering to keep up visually.

In other words, when rendering disparate textures, the decisions made with the lighter textures set the tone for everything else and when one then considers lighting and modeling (which Moebius ignores here, the scamp!), things can get tricky.

The delicate touch of this page smites this inker’s heart mostly keenly in panel 1, which we see blown up here. It is a bible for crosshatching in the first quarter-tones of the grey scale.

I mentioned that Jerry Cornelius’ face is rendered in the feminine style, ie. when inking women, always maintain a lighter touch and avoid modeling. Supposedly, Moebius used Patti Smith as photo reference for this face, I don’t know if this is true but no matter, he rendered her perfectly. The hatching describes the spherical volumes in the classic Moebius “stabby” short pattern with the classic Moebius 90-degree crosshatching in judicious passages.

Two additional points: first, Moebius has broken one of the Prime Directives here, the linework is dropping out slightly. I’ve seen several different print runs of this page and they are not quite up to snuff. He made the dots and lines of this passage too delicate and they are dropping ever so slightly. This is the danger of delicate crowquill work and this is why most fastidious, delicate cross-hatchers work at same size or very close to it. No reduction minimizes the dangers of sloppy pre-press, digital or photo-neg. It also reduces the sheer amount of labor required in covering the page with obsessive marks.

I know that Moebius had a fetish for inking bigger and bigger at one time in his career; I do not know the original size of this page and if any readers do, please let us know. My gut feeling is that this page was reduced too much — not that it was subjected to sloppy prepress.

The other point is one that seems to perplex some younger illustrators & comix lovers. Using photo reference is a perfectly healthy and useful practice for the illustrator, it is not cheating or “faking”. Before the camera came along, professional artists (ie. illustrators in modern parlance) used models and drew from life, often keeping these drawings in collections which were used as reference by other artists in the studio. When photography came along, they began collecting photographs of appropriate subject matter and continue to do so even now.

The danger of photos lies in their over-use by developing draftsmen, who unwittingly learn to copy the distortions and omissions of the photographic process and thus stunt their growth. Photos always lie in subtle ways and the experienced draftsman learns to correct them without conscious thought, simply by using his good eye.

In any case, despite the dropping of lines, panel 1 is an amazing performance. A delicate mood is maintained despite the wide span of tones and textures being rendered. The crosshatching on the face is classic, it demonstrates the natural evolutionary growth of stippling to hatching to crosshatching.

The delicate touch is a learned touch, it requires the hand to perform at the very edge of its physicality. Moebius mastered it after years of practice and used it to great effect in The Airtight Garage and elsewhere.

Let’s see an example of Albrecht "Big Daddy" Dürer in the same mode, a detail from his Fall of Man engraving. This sample has been blown up considerably and shows a consummate mastery of the stipple-hatch-crosshatch progression executed with the most demanding — and expressive — linear tool ever devised, the engraving burin.

I urge students of inking to visit the site that I got this sample from, it’s a massive blow-up of the engraving from Google and the MOFA-Boston. 75% of everything you need to know about classical, long-line spherical crosshatching is in this engraving. It's all in the hands, baby.

Moebius performed with pen and ink and paper, Dürer performed with steel and copper and engraver’s ink but the song remains the same — a woman’s face, a brass screen, a fur collar — it's all the same melodic, physically-inflected line. If it feels good (to your hand), it's good.

Moebius & The Airtight Garage: No. 3 … I ink the body electric

The Airtight Garage started off as a bit of a larkish bagatelle but as the book progressed, Moebius employed more and more stylistic & technical variations: fast vs. slow, chicken-fat vs. clear-line, etc. But it’s in the very first section, the Major Fatal prologue, that he really played his hand, as we gambling inkers say.

I have to confess that page 10 is one of my favorite pages in the entire AG. It’s a classic example of direct inking, where the penciling is minimal and the inking is mostly improvised on the fly. Such a strategy compels the inker’s hand to show its stuff without resorting to any stylistic subterfuge and is not for the weak-hearted and handed.

The rule of this page (and yes, the first three rules of black & white camera-ready art that pleases the eye are still in force) is zen-like in its simplicity:

4. Ink to reveal the hand, not just the objects being rendered

It’s all about the hand, its presence on this page is overwhelming, much more so than in most commercial work Moebius (and other illustrators) did. Until several years ago, most book & high-end magazine work preferred a crisp, slick surface. The hand was usually hidden behind a Potemkin village of polished, impenetrable marks and on the whole, readers seemed to prefer it that way.

The Major Fatal prologue was a bit of a reaction to this. On page 10, the hand shows itself everywhere — but never clumsily. And it’s not just the obvious scribbling on the man’s face in panel 1 or the nervous foliage in panel 3. The entire pattern created by the hand’s movement leaps forward to create a nervous tension on all levels.

Panel 2 is exquisitely well-inked and deserves careful study. The background has vanished and we’re left with a brilliant, fast passage of contour drawing on horse & rider. It is so fast that we can see the delicate marks of the half-lifted nib whenever it changes heading. The nib is omnidirectional, it’s rounded enough to move spontaneously in all directions, unlike more precise nibs which catch and “sneeze” ink when moving too fast.

This gives the hand free rein to manoeuver and also allows the physical liquidity of the ink to flavor the rendering. That is to say, the ink blobs and crawls a bit (and each brand of ink behaves differently) whenever the hand’s impetus overwhelms the nib’s inertia.

The movements are economical, the nib leaves the paper as little as often, note the liquid parsimony of the man’s splayed hand. The description of the horse’s head perfectly breaks up the positive & negative spaces and then the pen goes down the neck, first hatching from 1 o’clock to 7 o’clock, then squiggling nervously and executing a half-spiral before exiting that passage.

Here’s an overlay explaining this. It also shows the same rapid, automatic movement of the hand that has rendered the man’s face in panel 1. The whiskers are grizzled with nervous scribbling while the eyes & nose are perfectly described with furious hatching.

This sort of fast, unthinking and rhythmic angling of a nib around a spherical volume not only describes an object; it’s also provides an immense, somatic pleasure to the inker’s hand. It feels right. The pleasure of movement is the key. The experienced hand’s muscle memory renders such angling passages with gusto. And as I've mentioned before, this "stabby" spherical movement was the foundation of Moebius' crosshatching technique, a technique which we'll analyze in a later posting.

I mentioned the stylistic Potemkin village before. The inker’s hand is often hidden behind one and to be honest, it’s not such a bad thing after all. This writer, in his own inking, has deeply immured himself in a byzantine, utterly impenetrable Potemkin village of inking. Perhaps one day I’ll venture out and mingle with the local mujiks but for now, I prefer my hand to remain hidden. The somatic pleasure of intricate crosshatching has its own peculiar intensity, in particular when rendering the long serpentine arcs of deeply spherical volumes at obsessive length.

It’s important for modern inkers to remember that not only are they entertaining eyes but that they are doing so by making a unique hand-made object. Electronically shuffling numbers and facts in the digital Potemkin village of virtual reality pays better but the mental and physical pleasure of highly skilled manual labor has its own rewards. The mass reproduction of these objects is a subject unto itself but for now, the point is understanding how Moebius built his success upon his hand, upon the specific marks and general patterns that its movement made upon the page.

His performance was not only conceptually stimulating, it was also physically grounded in the reality of muscle and nerve and steel and paper and ink. The Airtight Garage was a mental and physical performance on all levels.

Finally, here’s two examples of pen work which show the hand. I apologize for the da Sesto’s quality, my main reference library is 600 miles away and I must rely on the internet for these drawings.

Albrecht Dürer, pen & ink

Cesare da Sesto, pen & ink

These are pen and ink performances from the early Renaissance, one in the Italian style and one in the German style. I usually choose mechanically reproduced examples (to match the three rules of The Airtight Garage) but this time I wanted to show the naked hand, so to speak.

We artists work in a world obsessed with creating perfectly commodified virtual realities which disdain the ethos of the skilled hand — for both commercial and conceptual reasons, I fear. But the airtight performances of Moebius — they dance elegant rings around the clumsy shambles of these latest re-inventions of our human reality.

The rhetoric of the hand, it's a resurgence of the Baroque aesthetic, in essence, and it re-affirms the power — and utility — of drawing happily. Ecce homo faber!

NB. One other thought has occurred to me regarding the stylistic display of the hand in inking: the use of Rapidographs & felt-tip markers. There are many inkers who do excellent work with the latter tools but this curmudgeon must confess that he harbors the sneaking suspicion that these artists' work would be even better with dip pens … the mono-width nib doesn't really show how one's hand has pushed and pulled and scrabbled about on the paper with the nib. The convenience is outweighed by the reduction in stylistic options. Crosshatching is deadened, the hand-heavy style is restrained and as for clear line with Rapidograph — the horror, the horror!

Moebius & The Airtight Garage: No.1 … I Ink Therefore I am

Here’s a first installment in a series of critiques of the (mostly) pen & ink techniques of the late Moebius (Jean Giraud). I plan to intersperse them with my Snark GN postings, so don't freak out, fellow Carrollians.

For now I’ll focus on his Airtight Garage, a scorched-earth masterpiece in which he rang through almost all the changes of pen and brush, a bravura performance which utterly blew this inkster’s mind when he first saw it in Heavy Metal in the 70s. We could sum up The Airtight Garage as a comix version of the Goldberg Variations, a series of constrained deviations to delight both connoisseur and professional.

Good inking is a performance, frozen in time by the medium of mass-reproduction, and like all performances, it follows rules, overt or otherwise. The Airtight Garage has 3 basic rules:

1. Only two colors will be used: black and white. (1)

2. All artwork will be camera-ready, ie., cleanly inked with no excessive wasted work when reduced (dropped-out or filled-in line-work), no shadows, sloppy pro-whiting, left-over penciling, etc.

3. The final results will be attractive to the viewer.

The last rule is crucial, it is the Prime Directive of the commercial illustrator. In fact, all 3 of these rules are commercial in nature but that’s beside the point for now. What matters is what Moebius added to these rules, employing different constraints upon different pages with results reminiscent of the salad days of Oulipo.

Let’s start with a great page from the AG: number 36. What are the rules of this page?

4. no brush work, only pen and furthermore, at least one pen was a nicely flexible nib (using different nibs on the same page is a double-plus-good inking practice … although using only one nib can also serve as a good constraint).

5. minimal crosshatching, almost entirely hatching

6. a high-keyed lighting scheme, ie., inking mostly in the 0-40% zone of the greyscale, with only a minimum of shadows and spotting. This tonal scheme is one of the hallmarks of The Airtight Garage; Moebius loved the contrast of delicate tonalities spotted with a few judicious dark passages and it gave his inking a solarized feel, an American southwest desert lighting scheme which contrasts deliciously with the French sensibilities of the (minimal) plot. We should also note that, all theorizing aside, high-key inking is often faster to execute.

The first tier sets the tone of the page. The loose hatching on the backs of both the man and the woman semi-serves as a contour function, roughly indicating volume. There's a minimal crosshatching, normal to the long lines and probably done wet on wet. The man’s hatching lines are drifting too far apart to integrate with the white. They are functioning on their own, tending more towards pattern/calligraphy instead of tone/local texture.

There is a ratio between the thickness of an inked line and the thickness of the adjacent white line (2) that when done properly creates an effect I call “petillance”, a sort of optical sparkle similar to the chromatic analogue of simultaneous contrast. The effect works with both hatching & crosshatching but because Moebius kept the AG mostly high-keyed, we see little of it. Petillance works with any line width but rarely below a 40% over-all tone. The amount of reduction also effects it and that should be taken into account when using it.

The Beardsley drawing shown here is a classic example of petillance (a bit dark though, which is not a requisite of the technique) and Beardsley would have been aware of it thanks to the commercial wood-engraving techniques that had become obsolete in his own lifetime.

In page 36 of The Airtight Garage, the girl’s hair in tiers 1 and 2 has nice passages of petillance in them, which is why they look so satisfyingly rich and crisp to the eye. In addition, unlike the man's back, the girl's hatching in tier one is mostly petillant, owing to the tighter spacing in proportion to line width (or vice versa, the white lines are sized in a better proportion to the black lines).

The backs of the figures in tier 1 have locked in the general inking feel of the page. Moebius had a penchant for letting his lines shed their tonal and volumetric function and work in a more calligraphic, patterned manner, weaving them in and out of more tonal hatching/crosshatching. This calligraphic business creates a powerful rhythm on the page and it requires a flexible nib, really good hot-plate paper and most of all, a steady, confident hand moving quickly.

In fact, one could classify all pen work by the velocity of the hand moving the nib. Faster means more swell and taper, more energy and also, more reliance on draftsmanship. Slow is the speed of a more classical and conservative crosshatcher who focuses on rendering volume, shade and texture and eschews the bravura of calligraphy.

Which leads us to the starting rule of this particular page, or at least of the first two tiers:

7. Make lots of optically long lines.

There’s a bit of dashing and dotting here and there and a soupçon of crosshatching but on the whole, the lines in the first two tiers are long and draw attention to themselves, especially by avoiding petillance. Long lines require either slowing down to make them seamless, or, as Moebius loved to do, butting medium long, mono-width, unswelled lines end to end. The hatching in the very first panel shows this butting nicely. It avoids using crosshatching to create the darks and goes straight into a solid spotting. This butting together of shorter lines was a basic move of Moebius’ crosshatching (and most French crosshatching of the time) and when done as crosshatching, it means simultaneously advancing & rotating nib and hand in an orbit around the axis of the implicit spherical volume.

The hair passages in tiers 1 and 2 are not only petillant but also governed by lines of beauty. Note that in the uppermost left-hand corner of the 2nd tier, the man's hair drifts so far apart that the lines tend to cease cooperating with the white, although their natural tendency to revert to purely calligraphic lines is subverted by a loss of curve and swell (3) in certain spots. The lagging of this passage is confirmed by the slight shakiness of the lines; my suspicion is that Moebius was going too fast to bother with turning the page to a more comfortable angle.

NB. On the other hand, just to show how attention to detail pays off, Moebius takes care to make the borders of the whole page petillant, using the classic scotch rule so beloved by those wood-engraving petillistes of yore.

The shorter line-work of the rendering of faces and wall in tier 2 makes a good optical foil for the superb calligraphic passage of the three guards standing in the door. When doing linear rendering at a smaller scale, judicious omission is critical — one is creating a pattern, not tonal volumes — and Moebius flavors the contour lines with delicate flecking and dotting which he also deploys in the girl’s face. Note that most of the minimal marks of her face still cling to the invisible grid of the contour lines governing an implicit and undrawn crosshatching.

Then he moves down and lets the girl’s neck go calligraphic, along with the back of her seat and her shoulders. This panel is quite beautiful, the mixing of techniques creates an infinite depth of field, in other words, Moebius avoids the traditional use of a focal design point and lets everything in the panel come forward all at once. The effect is dreamlike and precise at once.

Tiers 1 and 2 are inked in a somewhat different style than the bottom of the page; down here Moebius speeds up his hand. The lines get shorter and the remaining long lines are really the contour lines, which are far more jumpy than before. One might say that the bottom of the page has jettisoned the long-line rule, in which case, we’ll decide to amend our last rule to:

8a. Speed up on the last tier’s inking.

The bottom of the page is executed faster and reads faster, more energetic and jumpier. The final panel has some very long contour lines (almost naked in their avoidance of thick-thin calligraphy and relying entirely on the skillful negative spacing of good draftsmanship to succeed) but most of the linework is fast and “stabby” with the nib. Note how the spotting of black shadows in the first panel of tier 3 is so nervous that the white flecks go petillante, which gives the lighting scheme that classic Moebius solarized desert feeling — even indoors!

The reason for this change of rule? Who knows … pressing deadlines? Some unexpected Lebanese Sunshine? A hot date for the night? I think we have here another axiom of our art-as-performance-game, an axiom which eludes some critics:

9. Be prepared to go aleatory. Stuff happens, finish the page no matter what.

Perhaps Moebius sped up on purpose or perhaps he just got distracted by something, we’ll never know. In any case, we clearly see his hand speeding up but still remaining accurate.

One of the paramount qualities of Moebius’ inking style was the dominance of the hand. His physical pleasure in drawing shaped every line, every panel and every page. He reminds me very much of Velasquez or Rubens at their best (which was superhuman), where the brush movements revealed their total immersion — and joy — in the visual story. (4)

The long line rule is a basic move in inking and Moebius tended towards it more and more in his career until he entered a genuine clear-line phase for several years. It should be pointed out that his draftsmanship was so good that this was an inevitable development. Technique is mastered to be thrown away at some point and I think he felt that clear-line would satisfy this zen-like rule. Alas, not only was the garage airtight but his draftsmanship seems to have been so innate that he could not throw it away. (5)

More to the point for us lesser inking mortals is that fact that the long line rule is essentially a calligraphic move. At the foot of the page Moebius slips into a faster mixed tonal-calligraphic mode with a nervous, shorter line, but the calligraphic still dominates. As a French inker, Moebius was well aware of the classical line tradition and for the French (as opposed to the German/Dutch tradition) it really begins with the calligraphic, not the volumetric attitude.

To round things off, let’s have a sample of hatching with a long-line and without significant petillance from Albrecht Dürer, the Renaissance master who perfected and standardized the two poles of line-work: the fast-calligraphic-hatching pole and the slow-tonal-crosshatching pole. Quite an accomplishment and more to the point, both styles still attract the jaded 21st-century eye (see Rule #3) and reproduce well (Rule #2) at a minimal cost (Rule #1) when done properly.

We are all Dürer’s children, even Moebius. Different technologies allowed the latter to greatly expand the rules of the inking performance-game but both men relied on this final, most important inker's axiom:

10. Draw, don’t just ink. And remember that you’re drawing with white.

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(1) Moebius used zipatone on a few pages but technically, it’s still black. Anyone who’s ever shot photostats or film negs will confirm this to any readers who want to quibble over this point. Stipplers may want to weigh in also, if there's any of them left.

(2) The white of the page is not an empty space; it’s the equivalent of the black ink. Never forget that you are drawing with white at the same time as you’re drawing with black, and oftentimes you’ll ink better in tricky passages if you keep your eye focused on the white — not on the black — as you ink.

(3) That is, swelling the line-work not by pushing on the nib but by drawing another line very close to it, often merging into it and sharing its curve.

(4) By visual story I don't mean the conceptual ideas and symbols, but the purely nonverbal meaning generated by the visual structure and components of a picture: its 2D vocabulary, grammar and syntax. This is the quality which delights what was once called a “good eye” in the business and it is the heart of good draftsmanship — not mindless realism or slick technique.

(5) Was this because his draftsmanship and personality were the same? A fruitful subject for the introspective pen-ster with a taste for existential inkery. The very word draftsmanship is so misunderstood these days, it seems to be mistaken for having a camera-eye or something similarly dullard. Draftsmanship is a translation of reality into movements of the hand which speak pictures in the eye's native language — not the language of words or dull habit or style.

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NB. If you're interested in the late 70s/early 80s comix & SF scene in North America, including the French Wave of Heavy Metal, there's a very fine blog here … Nicollet, Loustal, Caza, Moebius, plus the great Paul Kirchner, Chaykin, lots of journeyman SF cover art … I'm keeping my fingers crossed for some Nicole Claveloux and a bit of B&W Bilal

The Snark Whisperer

This explication of my GN version of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark resumes its Jubjubian subplot for yet another stanzel … we are in the midst of Fit the Fifth and discussing the ways of the Jubjub Bird …

Lewis Carroll regales us here with a spirited description of a Jubjub being tortured by a variety of methods whose diabolical ingenuity and inventive discomfort seem uncomfortably redolent of an impromptu herd of schoolboys possessing the usual cretinous surplus of high spirits and moral pygmyism.

Carroll’s closest associate, C.L. Dodgson, would have been quite familiar with such goings-on, both as grim memories of his own public-schooling at Rugby and more to the point, as part of his quotidian duties as a maths tutor at Christ Church, where we can have little doubt that the vast majority of his students possessed a similar burning enthusiasm to make things hot for all creatures great and small.

This implicit connection twixt torture and mathematics must have troubled Dodgson’s gentle soul; no doubt he shared his unease with the more worldly Carroll, who then incorporated all of the above into this snappy bit of verse which we are chewing over right now.

In his Annotated Snark, Martin Gardner briefly discussed Prof. John Leech’s observations upon the mathematical implications of this stanza. Leech noted that by substituting locuses (or loci) for locusts, and tape measure for tape, one is then provided with the rudimentary instructions for the sawing and gluing together of the various wooden rods necessary for the skeletal framework of a regular polyhedron.

One can have little doubt that these instructions for the construction of a geometric solid would have provided Dodgson’s students with some considerable discomfort! From their 19th-century British discomfort they would have slipped, inevitably, into the very graphic slough of a fullblown 16th-century German melancholia, with all its attendant polyhedronal tortures!

Huzzah for the symmetrical mathematical-moral shape of things in our cozy world of boiled and salted Jubjubs-cum-schoolboys, ‘tis all very well thought out, Messers Carroll and Dodgson! The morally high-minded reader can chuckle appreciatively at all this, the rest of you just rattle your jewelry in a passing gust of old-fashioned schadenfreude.

NB. I must draw your attention, my dear Watson, to the curious incident of the dog barking at the moon. It is a Catalonian, 20th-century dog prone to bouts of selenic melancolia originating from its anachronistic exile to Nuremberg.

Looking for Mister Goodsnark

More Jubjubbery, something about polyhedrons and super-glue and winged insects fleeing the less fashionable bit of the Bible.

Readers seeking the correct explanation of the above stanzel will find it here … readers simply looking for a bit of fun with a Jubjub (single or divorced, with or without children and still retaining her perfectly symmetrical shape) are encouraged to send their particulars on the back of a twenty-rupee bill to this blog.

When deadlines press, inspiration takes a powder!

Fit the Fifth, Page 36, Panel 4 … Jubjub, at first though sweet, bitter ere long back on itself recoils

“You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue:
You condense it with locusts and tape:
Still keeping one principal object in view —
To preserve its symmetrical shape.”

Our Hunting of the Snark resumes its Jubjubian subplot for yet another stanzel; Lewis Carroll regales us here with a spirited description of a Jubjub being tortured by a variety of methods whose diabolical ingenuity and inventive discomfort seem uncomfortably redolent of an impromptu herd of schoolboys possessing the usual cretinous surplus of high spirits and moral pygmyism.

Carroll’s closest associate, C.L. Dodgson, would have been quite familiar with such goings-on, both as grim memories of his own public-schooling at Rugby and more to the point, as part of his quotidian duties as a maths tutor at Christ Church, where we can have little doubt that the vast majority of his students possessed a similar burning enthusiasm to make things hot for all creatures great and small.

This implicit connection twixt torture and mathematics must have troubled Dodgson’s gentle soul; no doubt he shared his unease with the more worldly Carroll, who then incorporated all of the above into this snappy bit of verse which we are chewing over right now.

In his Annotated Snark, Martin Gardner briefly discussed Prof. John Leech’s observations upon the mathematical implications of this stanza. Leech noted that by substituting locuses (or loci) for locusts, and tape measure for tape, one is then provided with the rudimentary instructions for the sawing and gluing together of the various wooden rods necessary for the skeletal framework of a regular polyhedron.

One can have little doubt that these instructions for the construction of a geometric solid would have provided Dodgson’s students with some considerable discomfort! From their 19th-century British discomfort they would have slipped, inevitably, into the very graphic slough of a fullblown 16th-century German melancholia, with all its attendant polyhedronal tortures!

Huzzah for the symmetrical mathematical-moral shape of things in our cozy world of boiled and salted Jubjubs-cum-schoolboys, ‘tis all very well thought out, Messers Carroll and Dodgson! The morally high-minded reader can chuckle appreciatively at all this, the rest of you just rattle your jewelry in a passing gust of old-fashioned schadenfreude.

NB. I must draw your attention, my dear Watson, to the curious incident of the dog barking at the moon. It is a Catalonian, 20th-century dog prone to bouts of selenic melancolia originating from its anachronistic exile to Nuremberg.