John Heron Project

And now the shelf above that:

— Item one.

A steel ruler, showing imperial measurements. Along one edge is a dark brown stain, almost like rust, but not.

— Item two.

A glass eye, brown.

— Item three.

A Bible, Authorised Version. Alis picks it up and flips through it. Many of the pages have been annotated to varying degrees in red pen; the annotations are mostly hostile to the text, and often obscene. She decides to photograph some of the pages.

— Item four.

A violin, strung with what looks like human hair.

Item five.

A black plastic box, with odd holes and what looks like tape. Alis has to go into focus mode and search the online archive to figure out what it actually is: it’s an eight-track cartridge. It has no label.

Items six through thirteen.
Eight books, flat on the shelf, one piled neatly on top of another:
6. A nursery rhyme collection.
7. The Errors of Profane Religion by Firmicus Maternus. Budé edition.
8. A paperback edition of Goethe’s Faust.
9. A copy of The Strand, this edition from January 1912.
10. Montague Summers’ translation of the Malleus Maleficarum. An edition from the 1920s.
11. A slim book dating back to the turn of the century with no title on the spine. The flyleaf gives the title: Atlantis and Me. There is no publisher, author, location or publication date. Alis pulls it out and reads a few pages. It seems to be some sort of autobiography.
12. A children’s picture book: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.
13. A copy of Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of the Earth and Man by Rudolf Steiner (New York, 1990 edition).

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 5:26 am and is filed under Bite-size serials, John Heron, Memory Sticks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.