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Wisdom while you wait

Chapter 12: Patent Book Shelf Beds.
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About This Book

A brief satirical miscellany masquerades as promotional material for a ludicrously grand encyclopaedia, blending parodic advertising copy, faux testimonials, a boastful preface, and absurdly detailed terms of sale. Fragments include mock lists of editors and departments, ridiculous delivery and storage schemes, secret-packing forms, and officious warnings that escalate into surreal consequences. The piece lampoons commercial hype, publishing pretension, and bureaucratic pomposity by using hyperbole, formal documents, and comic inversion of practical concerns.

Patent Book Shelf Beds.

Mr. Honey-Buckle’s patent Dormi-Cyclo, registered as The Bee, is an ingenious contrivance so arranged that what appears to be merely a handsome set of shelves containing our colossal work of reference, will, by the pressure of a button, turn into a comfortable four-poster.

Those readers who are reduced to the natural end of perusing our pages have but to press the button to find the pillows ready for them.

Honey-Buckle’s Bee combines

BANE AND ANTIDOTE.


Lord Curzon writes:—

Government House, Calcutta.

‘Your Dormi-Cyclo most satisfactory. Have never had better nights.’


Dr. Sven Hedin writes:—‘As a means of combating the notorious insomnia prevalent in the highlands of Thibet I took your Dormi-Cyclo with me on my recent journey. It never failed. The Grand Lama after one trial sank into a state of coma from which he has not since emerged.’