Rocketing

And rocketry with Peter Newell

The Rocket Book by Peter Newell

This one, too, might seem obvious. But we have to do it justice all the same, and nonetheless. For those who have not been reading this newsletter for the past two days, I will let you into something you may not have heard of before. In the last century, at the beginning of that century, to be precise, an artist called Peter Newell was experimenting with form. He’d done many things before he did his experimenting. He’d illustrated poetry and stories. Later on, he would illustrate patriotic books for children. He was a gifted artist, although his pictures were not beyond the wit of others’ imaginations.

They were serious, decent and sometimes funny examples of what was on offer in those days. Not much worse than anything that was really high tier, but not much better than the kinds of illustrations companies paid for to have their adverts printed.

Newell’s work was, to my eye, quite unremarkable. And there is no shame in not being the best, the path-breaking, mould-breaking genius, on a historic scale. Surely there is not.

But what Newell had that other artists did not necessarily have was a desire and a will to make things change. To make things differently. To use different materials to have his art come to life and to fruition.

I can’t say Newell was a total pioneer. You can read chapbooks from the very early nineteenth century (there are scans of them online) which are pop-up books or fold-outs. They are sometimes even fold-ins, rather like Mad magazine later did. There was a lot of experimentation with printed culture, with the world of paper entertainments, and we do not know much about history if we insist there was not.

But we can take this too far. We can take it far enough to say, wrongly, that no one who did anything formally inventive after 1900, in books for children or for adults, really proved all that different. Anyone who said that would be committing an error; they could be spreading an untruth.

The first book by Newell was called The Hole Book and it was compounded and given shape because the book itself had a hole in it. Not one put there accidentally (for that would be a bad and unlikely thing), but instead a hole put there deliberately for reasons of drama and tension.

What was the hole caused by? In reality, probably some kind of industrial punch. The individual leaves of the book were set and printed and made up, and then they were punched. That is probably how it was done. And then they were assembled and bound in the usual way. It was impressive to have all the pages line up so well, and for the hole to go so cleanly through where it was meant to go in the illustrations. To make the illustrations work.

And of course, in the illustrations themselves, in the book itself, the hole is caused by a bullet: a bullet fired by a foolish child whose shot strikes a clock on the mantle and just keeps going, smacking into everything in its way (horse and cart, car, hotel, sack of grain, and so on) until the end of the story, where its flight is finally and abruptly terminated. As all things eventually are.

And one of Newell’s other formal inventions, as I have twice said, was in writing The Slant Book, a book where both pages were not cubes but diamonds, rotated on their axis somewhat, and looking a little when opened like modern flag of Nepal.

This was useful because the story Newell wanted to tell (using both his art and his poems, which were not so good) was that of a runaway, a runaway pram. And you need a slope for the pram to career along and down, don’t you, readers? You really do need one of those most clearly.

The book on a slant was pretty funny. I won’t say the art was excellent. I would call it competent instead. It did the job, and after a hundred and fifteen years, that’s not too bad for me.

This book, The Rocket Book, is like the book about a hole than it is a book about a slant. Because it, too, has an alteration not in page shape but in page integrity: i.e. there’s a hole in these pages, too. As well there might be.

And what’s the cause of all this?

You may ask.

What is the cause? A rocket has been let off in the basement of a big, tall block of flats. It goes up through the ceiling. And of course, the ceiling of one flat is the floor of another. And so it goes up and up and up, disturbing everyone, causing immense mischief and confusion and mania. A few of these incidents stand out.

A man is preparing for a bath only to find that his tub has been holed by the rocket. Another man is trying to read a sensible newspaper only to discover that it’s been neatly punched out from within. The rocket goes through a dining table; it goes through an alarm clock. It shoots through the floor of a nursery and upends a rocking horse.

In other words, all hell breaks loose.

I did enjoy this book of Newell’s; but I must say, it is a little like the others. Just as this review is but a pale copy, a vain replication, of those that have gone before.