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National Amateur Press Association
Monthly Bundle Sample, Leather or Prunella 10, February 2000, p.1
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LEATHER OR PRUNELLA
A JOURNAL OF INDIFFERENT STUFF
Worth makes the man, and want of it, the fellow.
The rest is all but leather or
prunella.
Alexander Pope,
Essay on Man,
IV, 203-204
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Whole No. 10. Published by Ken Faig, Glenview, Illinois,
for the NAPA Bundle. This issue dated 02/2000.
AN EARLY AMATEUR CLERIHEW?NOT!
The clerihew is a form of verse defined by Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary
as "a light verse quatrain rhyming aabb and usually dealing with a
person named in the initial rhyme." The verse form is named for
detective novelist Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956), who is
generally credited with its invention. Bentley's first published
collection of clerihews,
Biography for Beginners,
was originally published by T. Werner Laurie in London in October
1905, in a much-reprinted edition illustrated by G. K. Chesterton.
The collection begins with Bentley's classic clerihew:
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with
some men,
"If anybody calls
"Say I am designing St. Paul's."
A lesser-known clerihew by Harvard poet David McCord deals with
another architect, Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), who designed the
home office building of New England Life in Boston:
Ralph Adams Cram
One morning said damn
And designed the Urn Burial
For a concern actuarial.
You can see that the clerihew has the potential of a lot of
funand usually very little malice. While working on Edith
Miniter the other day, I was pleased to notice a poem of hers,
first published in the "Advertisements" column of
The Hub Club Quill
for April 1902, which on first impression strikes one as an example
of this obscure poetic form:
Mr. James Ferdinand Morton
The question constantly thought on,
As to whether 'twere best
This existing out west
Or to come back and LIVE here in Boston.
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