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At a revolutionary printing office* |
Men V. Machinery. Suggestive Facts and Figures, urging National Control of National Powers of Production. By Thomas Shore. With Preface by H. Halliday Sparling. 20 pp., price 2d.
This hints at quite advanced, possibly revolutionary, political views and brings to mind the world of Conrad's The Secret Agent and nihilists in blue-tinted glasses... Shore's 1886 periodical was eight pages in length and printed on red paper rendering it hard to read. It may have been a simple bookish curiosity about strange and outlandish books, not uncommon at the time. However the Book Lore review mention of "oatmeal upon which to cultivate literature and revolution" and "blood red paper" suggests a more provocative, contrarian purpose and it may have a place in a completist collection of punk literature (along with Wyndham Lewis's puce monster BLAST also 'flung into the camp of the orthodox' 28 years later.) The review in Book Lore reads thus: [We have left in the news item that follows it suggesting John Ruskin was a graffiti artist.]
No. I of The Dynamiter, which is said to be "a record of Literary Bombshells, books old new, flung into the camp of the orthodox," consists of eight quarto pages, printed on blood-red paper, and the editor says that since "every man has to pay rent, rates, and taxes, as well as buy food and clothing, it is a farce to talk about working wholly and solely for love of a cause." The information supplied by this engaging print is not, judging from the solitary number before us, of any value;