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Wisdom while you wait

Chapter 8: Secrecy Guaranteed if Required.
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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.

Secrecy Guaranteed if Required.

Conscious as we are that the acquisition of an INSIDECOMPLETUAR is tantamount to a confession of ignorance, we have made arrangements for the complete deception of the neighbours of Fellows of the Royal Society, and Members of other learned Societies. Purchasers have but to express the wish and we will express the volumes packed to simulate alien articles, such as groceries, pianos, blocks of granite, pressed beef, hardware, cork lino, Derby Brights, coffins, or the Dictionary of National Biography.

The purchaser has only to fill up and return the appended form:—

To the Proprietors of the INSIDECOMPLETUAR BRITANNIAWARE.

SIR,—I enclose [here insert the amount of your first instalment] as a first instalment of the purchase-money of your inestimable boon. In sending the volumes please pack them to resemble [here insert whatever you wish the volumes to be so packed as to resemble].

Believe me, yours gratefully and admiringly,

[Here insert your name.]


Mr. Bernard Shaw writes: ‘So admirable were the precautions of your secret supply service that Mrs. Shaw is still under the impression that the cellar merely contains a year’s supply of Grape Nuts.’