The Literary Cranks of London - Omar Khayyam Club

We could find no further copies of  the 1894 London journal The Sketch which in that year was running a series 'The literary cranks of London.' However the 1899 publication The Book of Omar and Rubaiyat has an essay on the Omar Khayyam Club entitled 'The literary cranks of London' by 'A Member' which is almost certainly reprinted from the series. The book shows a menu card for the society designed by the PRB artist Simeon Solomon. The other club in the series was 'The Johnson Club' - there were possibly more.
Mention is made here of 'The Ghouls' which may pay further investigation... Of the many societies that flourished then the Omar Khayyam is one of the few to have survived and still meets. There is also an American chapter.

THE OMAR KHAYYAM CLUB 

By A MEMBER 

The literary cranks of London are as the sand of 

the sea-shore for number, and yet they have 

rather diminished than increased during the last few 

years. The Wordsworth Society no longer collects 

archbishops and bishops and learned professors in the 

Jerusalem Chamber to solve the mystery of existence 

under the guidance of the great poet of Rydal, and one 

is rather dubious as to whether the Goethe Society has 

much to say for itself to-day, although in its time it 

has crammed the Westminster Town Hall with enthu- 

siastic lovers of German literature. The Shelley Society 

one only hears of from time to time by its ghastly bur- 

den of debt, a state which perhaps reflects the right 

kind of glory upon its great hero, whose aptitude for 

making paper boats out of Bank of England notes, if 

apocryphal, is, at any rate, a fair exemplification of his 

capacity for getting rid of money. And as to the 

Browning Society, with its blue-spectacled ladies, deep 

in the mysteries of Sordello, if the cash balance, 

which is said at Girton to have been expended in 

sweetmeats, had any existence, at the London centre, 

one knows not what confectioner at the West End 

has reaped the benefit.

The Literary Cranks of London - The Cemented Bricks

I came across this oddly named literary coterie quite recently in a catalogue by the august bookseller and writer John Saumarez Smith in a scholarly note about one of its members - the writer (anthologist) Robert Maynard Leonard (1869 - 1941) who among other things was secretary to the Anti-Bribery League, which sounds like something from a G K Chesterton short story. Members of the 'Cemented Bricks' included Richard le Gallienne, Walter Jerrold, Sir John Parsons, Lord Amulree and Joseph Knight. The web yields very little about them except this page from The Sketch of 13/2/1895 bought for the price of a mocha latte on eBay. It remains unknown to Google books and even Brewster Kahle (praise his name) has not archived it... At the same time we bought another in the series of 'Literary Cranks of London' on 'The Vagabond Club' which will follow later.


The Literary Cranks of London.

The Cemented Bricks.

The Cemented Bricks.! Who or what are they? Is it a new order of Hod-fellows, or is it a building society?

That question, or series of questions, was put to me by a lady three years ago. This article will supply the answer.

About five years ago, four young men in London were drawn together by a certain similarity of journalist-literary tastes and aspirations. They had gravitated together from various places; one from a chemist's shop, via a Hull newspaper; another from a newspaper office in the West of England; the third from a similar centre of 'light and lending' in Lancashire; while the fourth would be penman and present writer was chained, as Lamb puts it, to the "desk's dead wood" in a counting-house near the Strand.