For 50 P. or the Yen or Dollar equivalent, one may purchase a fine little card from West House Gargoyle Editions titled “Notes and Observations on John Taylor, The Water Poet.” by Alan Halsey. On one side is a fantastic 17th century engraving of a mnemonic device (if I’m not mistaken) of a doll-faced man with boots and spurs in place of hands and long, brush-fingered gloves for slippers striding through a collage of inverted castle and candle, horse with whip in hoof driving a porter’s cart, a black mouse contemplating a cat’s rear (with mayhem in mind?) and a black hare thinking ditto about another cat in mid-sprint. There’s a monk (or knight?) balancing on hands with feet against the bottom of a wheel barrow, which in turn is blancing on wheel, and a fish floating slowly through the air along with an eel, undulating right along through blue space. But this adorable card gets even better with what’s inside. I’ll only share three rare lines from this beauty bit, but what cheesecake to read, contemplate and pronounce out loud they are!

* * *
I know you know John Taylor a mechanical waterman
firkt Ferrited and finely fecht Fennor the Rymer ouer the coales
his Revenge to be transported ouer sea in a Cods belly and cast up at Cuckolds Hauen
his 800 bad debters curried or clapper-clawed with a Kicksey Winsey the Writer hereof…
* * *

I wish I had written “firkt Ferrited and finely fecht”! Or the use of clapper-claw (one of my favorite words since coming across it in Smart’s Jubilate Agno!)–no one else would dare, but good A.H.!

But the gifts keep coming folks, and in the same package we find “Shew-Screen Scenarios; Readings in the Angelic Texts of Dr. John Dee & Edward Kelley together with Dee & Kelley’s Celestial Handbook,” a fragmented, collapsed, reframed and refashioned compilation of Enochian visual poems in which a few of my own marginalia float past like the steam rolling up from a hot spring on a winter’s day. I only wish I had the skill to reproduce a few of these refashionings in this ahadadian blog. However, though these are unpriced, this 50 page selection of eye-goodies as well as information regarding other West House goodies can be yours if you query alan[at]nethedge.demon.co.uk. And you don’t have to sign away your soul at the nearest crossroads to have them, I’m sure.