relatively spacious, and almost perfectly square. At the rear, on the left, there is a door to the cellar; in the middle, the lift cage; on its wrought-iron door, a notice has been hung; on the right, the first flight of the stairs. The walls are painted in light green gloss, the floor is laid with a very tightly knotted cord carpet. On the left-hand wall, the glass-panel door of the concierge’s office, draped with little lace curtains.
A woman is standing in front of the office, reading the list of the building’s occupants; she is wearing a capacious brown linen overcoat done up with a large fish-shaped brooch set with alabandite stones. A blood-red canvas bag is slung over her shoulder, in the manner of a bandolier, and in her right hand there is a sepia-tint photograph of a man in a black cloak. He has sideburns and pince-nez; he is standing beside a brass-and-mahogany revolving bookcase in Second Empire style, on the top of which there is a paste-glass vase filled with arum lilies. His top hat, gloves, and stick are laid beside him on a shell-encrusted kneehole desk.
This man – James Sherwood – was the victim of one of the most celebrated swindles of all time: in eighteen ninety-six, a pair of tricksters of genius sold him the vase in which Joseph of Arimathæa gathered the blood of Christ. The woman – an American novelist by the name of Ursula Sobieski – has spent three years unravelling this shady deal for her next book, and her research has finally brought her to visit this block of flats today, for some piece of information to end her investigations.
Born in Ulverston (Lancashire) in 1833, James Sherwood went overseas very young and became a druggist in Boston. In the early eighteen seventies he invented a ginger-based recipe for lung pastilles. In less than five years, these cough sweets became famous: they were vaunted by a celebrated slogan, “ Sherwoods Put You in the Mood ”, and illustrated on hexagonal vignettes showing a knight in armour driving his lance through the ghost of influenza personified as a grumpy old man lying flat on his stomach in a fog-enshrouded landscape: the vignettes were distributed in great numbers throughout America and painted on school blotters, on the backs of matchboxes, on soft-drink bottlecaps, on the reverse side of cheesebox lids, and on thousands of little toys and classroom baubles given away free to people who purchased a tin of Sherwoods at specified periods: pen-stands, exercise books, wooden cubes, little jigsaws, small gold-pans (exclusively for Californian customers), photos of leading music hall stars with forged autographs.
The colossal fortune which came with such prodigious popularity did not suffice, unfortunately, to cure the druggist of his affliction: he was kept in a virtually chronic state of lethargy and exhaustion by ineradicable neurasthenia. But at least the fortune allowed him to indulge just about the only activity which helped him forget his troubles: collecting unica .
In the jargon of the rare book, antique, and curio trade, an unicum , as its name implies, is an object which is the only one of its kind. This rather vague definition covers several classes of object; it can mean things of which only one example was ever made, such as the octobass, a monstrous double-bass for two musicians, one at the top of a ladder doing the fingering, the other on a mere stool drawing the bow, or the Legouix-Vavassor Alsatia, which won the Amsterdam Grand Prix in 1913 but was never marketed owing to the war; or it can mean animal species of which only one member is known to exist, like the tendrac Dasogale fontoynanti , the sole specimen of which was caught in Madagascar and is now in the Natural History Museum in Paris, like the butterfly Troides allottei bought by a collector in 1966 for 1,500,000 francs, or like the Monachus tropicalis , the white-backed seal whose existence is known only by a photograph taken in 1962, in Yucatan; or it can
A woman is standing in front of the office, reading the list of the building’s occupants; she is wearing a capacious brown linen overcoat done up with a large fish-shaped brooch set with alabandite stones. A blood-red canvas bag is slung over her shoulder, in the manner of a bandolier, and in her right hand there is a sepia-tint photograph of a man in a black cloak. He has sideburns and pince-nez; he is standing beside a brass-and-mahogany revolving bookcase in Second Empire style, on the top of which there is a paste-glass vase filled with arum lilies. His top hat, gloves, and stick are laid beside him on a shell-encrusted kneehole desk.
This man – James Sherwood – was the victim of one of the most celebrated swindles of all time: in eighteen ninety-six, a pair of tricksters of genius sold him the vase in which Joseph of Arimathæa gathered the blood of Christ. The woman – an American novelist by the name of Ursula Sobieski – has spent three years unravelling this shady deal for her next book, and her research has finally brought her to visit this block of flats today, for some piece of information to end her investigations.
Born in Ulverston (Lancashire) in 1833, James Sherwood went overseas very young and became a druggist in Boston. In the early eighteen seventies he invented a ginger-based recipe for lung pastilles. In less than five years, these cough sweets became famous: they were vaunted by a celebrated slogan, “ Sherwoods Put You in the Mood ”, and illustrated on hexagonal vignettes showing a knight in armour driving his lance through the ghost of influenza personified as a grumpy old man lying flat on his stomach in a fog-enshrouded landscape: the vignettes were distributed in great numbers throughout America and painted on school blotters, on the backs of matchboxes, on soft-drink bottlecaps, on the reverse side of cheesebox lids, and on thousands of little toys and classroom baubles given away free to people who purchased a tin of Sherwoods at specified periods: pen-stands, exercise books, wooden cubes, little jigsaws, small gold-pans (exclusively for Californian customers), photos of leading music hall stars with forged autographs.
The colossal fortune which came with such prodigious popularity did not suffice, unfortunately, to cure the druggist of his affliction: he was kept in a virtually chronic state of lethargy and exhaustion by ineradicable neurasthenia. But at least the fortune allowed him to indulge just about the only activity which helped him forget his troubles: collecting unica .
In the jargon of the rare book, antique, and curio trade, an unicum , as its name implies, is an object which is the only one of its kind. This rather vague definition covers several classes of object; it can mean things of which only one example was ever made, such as the octobass, a monstrous double-bass for two musicians, one at the top of a ladder doing the fingering, the other on a mere stool drawing the bow, or the Legouix-Vavassor Alsatia, which won the Amsterdam Grand Prix in 1913 but was never marketed owing to the war; or it can mean animal species of which only one member is known to exist, like the tendrac Dasogale fontoynanti , the sole specimen of which was caught in Madagascar and is now in the Natural History Museum in Paris, like the butterfly Troides allottei bought by a collector in 1966 for 1,500,000 francs, or like the Monachus tropicalis , the white-backed seal whose existence is known only by a photograph taken in 1962, in Yucatan; or it can
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