This is a game for the more robust personality. In the wrong crowd, this is not so much a way to break the ice at parties, as a way to crash into a bloody great iceberg. The kind of game they’d make everyone play in the Big Brother house if they wanted to cause murder.
In short, a vengeful god demands sacrifices and a piece of paper is passed round the group who have to mark on it who they would sacrifice first, and that person has to leave the room. This continues until there are only two people left, and this is where it gets slightly confusing. The instructions say to call out the name of the person least worthy to survive, but if there’s only two left then I’m not sure how it would work. Unless the we’re-not-worthy sacrificed in the hall outside are the ones shouting…?
I’m in no way a crime fiction expert, for that you need my friend Dave’s site What are you reading for ?Incidentally, it was this excellent post of his that inspired me to just bloody well get on with starting up my own site, so thank you, Dave – Six things I learnt from my blog.
Anyway, I bought this book for the cover and I’ve never, you know, actually read it. But what a cool, pulpy, noiry cover it is:
Dames Don’t Care, Peter Cheyney, 1937
As I haven’t read it, in my imagination, this book is the legendary “Lady Don’t Fall Backwards” that Tony Hancock and Sid James were eternally trying to get out of their library. Mixed with a touch of Woody Allen’s detective stories. And Lemmy Caution – what a brilliant detective name right there.
I got this in a library too, from the discarded 10p pile in Anfield library. As an old book aficionado, what I find sad is that Liverpool libraries don’t sell off their old stock anymore. I don’t know what happens to them, but apparently such sales didn’t fit into their new computer system. And the charity shops willing to sell dusty old tomes are getting fewer and farer between – most shops I go in now sell for the most part an identikit collection of still-current paperbacks, loads of biographies and the endless, multiple copies of “The World According to Clarkson”.
So where are the old books going? There’s the (seemingly growing ever smaller) number of antiquarian booksellers, still. And the double edged sword of eBay, Abe books, Amazon marketplace as well as the wonders of the free ebook scans available on demand. On the one hand, what a dream for the book buyer who knows what they are after (and I say this as someone who spent years on end looking in every second-hand bookshop I could see, in vain, for Marc Bolan’s book of poetry). Nearly everything is there, somewhere.
But the rummaging, the stumbling upon the hidden delight, is much diminished. And I particularly love the tangible hidden delight, the extra tucked in between the book pages, the piece of old newspaper used as a bookmark, for example. I have a few such things I will be posting about shortly (as well as my Grandad’s hidden treasure, kept between the leaves of what is most definitely the most singularly sinister book in my collection). As a history-lover I am a sucker for any little marker of previous ownership. Even the library page from my copy of The Weekend Book, and 1950s card markers:
Library plate, The Weekend Book, 1955
I find it sad that this excellent book sat on the library shelves for 24 years, from 1966 to 1990, only to then be discarded. But I love the fact that I can see this now. Hell, even at school I loved reading the names and dates of previous owners of my school books, as if I’d discovered some particularly interesting archive. This is partly why my favourite subjects are history and physics – what links these two is trying to make sense of time which, to me, is the biggest subject of all. As well as who is buying all those Clarkson books.
A legal oddity from The Weekend Book 1938 (but which had disappeared by the 1955 reprint).
Public swearing was against the law, but for some it was more against the law than others. Working on the basis that the posher you were, the better you should know, the fines went upwards depending on your social class.
A game this Friday from the 1938 Weekend Book. A game created by H G Wells, no less. And what did one of the most inventive literary minds of all time call this game? Yes, “Ball Game”. You will need a barn….
Ball Game, Weekend Book, 1938
Nb. See also the cheeky water game “Kissing at the bottom of the sea”.
In honour of my 40th birthday celebrations last night, I offer the cocktail and the cure, both from the 1938 edition of The Weekend Book.
Mr Sutton’s Gin-blind (“to be drunk with discretion”) is, I imagine, a kind of pre-war Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
To be followed by this massively hardcore hangover cure, that sounds like something an alchemist might brew up in a cauldron. I think I’ll stick with tea and toast.
It’s Friday and it’s time for some Skittish fun, courtesy of The Weekend Book. This is a book right up my street, full of all manner of games and instruction, written in 1924 but updated regularly up until around 1955. It takes itself not seriously at all, the book equivalent of some bright young things skittering around at a pre-war house party.
Just look at this gorgeous cover –
Today I give you “Up Jenkyns!” A game my grandad taught me and my brother, and is forever associated for me with a piece of cherry cake and a cup of tea. (Although I imagined it being spelt “Up Jenkins”). This was such a popular game that you’ll notice it doesn’t even bother explaining how you play it. So, for the uninitiated, you need two teams of at least two people on each side and a table. The teams sit either side of the table with one side hiding a sixpence (a new 5p is perfect) in one of their hands secretly under the table. Once hidden, the team then puts their fists on the table while the other team has to guess which hand holds the coin, with all the additions mentioned below.
