Guernsey's catchphrase copyrighting plan is catching

Thoroughly applaud Guernsey’s plan to make itself the catchphrase and mannerism IP litigation capital of the world.



Being almost a household name myself (blog readership figures now exceed total number of blog entries, even allowing for Russian bot-generated statistics) I’ve done an audit to identify any marketable tics and trademark utterances of my own.
 Research consisted of asking my 17-year-old son, who is convinced that I am a truly unique individual in many ways. We finally ended up with this list:

• Unique expression of confusion when attempting any complicated manual task.

• Unique combination of profanities and expletives following the above (for decency’s sake, the exact wording will be entered in a separate appendix, named Catchphrase A).

• Unique expression directed at 17-year-old son intended to defer blame for manual-task-related mishap from self to said 17-year-old-son.

• Unique fashion style as worn on high street, restaurants, tennis court, etc, a fusion of styles from every decade going back to the early 70s and featuring significant amounts of perished elastic.

• Unique combination of profanities and expletives directed at other users of the roundabout closest to our home (as above, separate appendix B).

He had more, but they were, with due respect, less than respectful.

This fledgling personal-brand IP scheme, does, of course, rely on other people being familiar with and copying one’s own mannerisms. The first issue, familiarity, is, according to my son, not a problem, apparently my mannerisms are universally known. As for the second, he is adamant that only a stunned octopus would knowingly attempt any such mimicking behaviour and then only in the safety of its cave.


But that could just be adolescent cheek.

Italy's typeface: why they won't win the European Cup

Clearly a superior side, why did Italy need to go to penalties to beat a tired-looking England team? Why didn’t the pundits take them seriously before the game? And why won’t they win the competition?

Simple. A typeface. I mean, just look at the picture below:

Typeface translation: "Enough with the aggression already, let's hug."

What the name on the back of your shirt should be saying is: ‘I am almighty. Deal with it.’

Instead, Italy’s typeface is saying: ‘Er, excuse me, but don’t you think the groundsmen have done a lovely job of cutting nice broad stripes into the grass? Oh, you’d like the ball?’

(And when your players are called stuff like 'Donucci' it really is important to put some kind of aggressive spin on them.)

So instead of running around feeling intimidated like they usually do in quarterfinals, the England team actually made a really brave attempt to not lose. Which crumbled when they got to the final penalty shootout, where shirt backs don’t really come into play.

Now can you imagine how seriously the Germans are going to take that typeface? Bar an emergency font rethink, it’s all over for Italy.

Sun comes out for virtual diamond jubilee street party

My virtual street party concept for a social media pitch earlier this year (with art director Pete Vincent), sadly unsold:

Technically, it was conceived as a mash-up of Google Streetview and Facebook, with party-goers uploading party headwear for the big day. Note Princess Eugenie's hat six places back on the right...

IKEA's interesting approach to customer service

Was spending some time in the Customer Services area of my local IKEA when I noticed the sign below:

IKEA bits buckets, a great customer service idea – or is it?

Genius, I thought, instead of having grumpy customers clogging up the queues just to ask for an extra IC3XB7 washer to replace the one that rolled under the fridge, they can just go and pick one up from one of these buckets.

Full marks for IKEA for thinking of the idea and for trusting their customers not to abuse the system.

So I took a closer look (it was a long wait I was having) and noticed that only two of the fifty buckets had anything in them.

Oh well.

The copywriter recruitment ad I'd write for myelf

Am I the only copywriter who’s tired of being patronised with recruitment ads promising ‘your big break at a multi-award winning agency’?

We all know that that kind of agency doesn’t need to actively recruit creatives. They have bouncers at the doors instead.

More realistic recruitment copy in today's adland reads something like this:

“Given a brief with more propositions than David Beckham on an away weekend, you’ll either come up with a better proposition yourself or, if the client absolutely refuses to budge, cram the conceptual camel through the eye of the needle anyway.

“If the art director has to take time out to do a shoot or gets struck down with norovirus, you won’t twiddle your thumbs until she gets back but just get scamping regardless. And in fact, some of your best ideas have come from working with planners, designers and other copywriters.

“You don't mind working late occasionally. But you’ve found that if you keep the accelerator all the way down during regular working hours, everyone gets to go home on time.

“You have a great track record on pitches, mainly because you savage the strategy on Day One rather than wait for someone else do it at the final creative review on Sunday evening.

“When a drunken research group throws an idea back in your face, you can separate the baby from the bathwater and make it smile even more cutely.

“You’ll fight tooth and nail for award-winning results and to lift the agency’s creative reputation. You’ll also fight for a lump of brown mud if you think it’s a harder-hitting piece of communication.”

If that’s a recruitment ad that’s relevant to your agency, please consider me to have applied.

Premier League final Sunday: a resounding script success

After an agony of strict confidentiality, I can now reveal that the events of the Barclays Premier League’s final Sunday were orchestrated and scripted by none other than myself after a gruelling strategic and creative process.

Initially dismissed by Sir Alex Ferguson and others as “wildly unbelievable”, my script was finally accepted with hardly any amendments by the disparate collection of stakeholders, and the plan flawlessly executed on the day. Here are the details:

Clients: The FA, Barclays Premier League and Sky

Target market: Jaded football viewers and football agnostics

Brief: Revitalise the Premier League brand both locally and internationally. Convert ‘Match of the Day’ viewers to Sky Sports subscriptions. Retain wavering Sky Sports subscribers.

Proposition: “Insane levels of excitement until the very last whistle”

A daunting brief, and without the total support of everyone involved, the final outcome would have been impossible. A special thank you to Joey Barton for playing the villain with such genuine commitment (the sacrifice was worth it).

Re Mr Mancini's extraordinary performance: at times the over-the-top histrionics risked believability but ultimately contributed to the humour of the occasion – in retrospect essential to relieve the unsustainable levels of tension.

See a final curtain call here:

Argentinian Falklands 2012 Olympics ad – creative fail

Seen this Argentinian Falklands/Olympics propaganda ad yet?

In the semi-dark, a man furtively creeps out onto the Falklands streets. Guiltily pulling up his hoodie, he goes for a jog, then hammily collapses into some sand.

“To compete on British soil, we train on Argentine soil,” read the titles.

As a jingoist rallying call to the Argentinians, the ad works fine. But when you consider that it was inevitable that the ad would go viral in the UK as well, it's an own goal*.

Even though I’ve never felt passionate about the Falklands, this ad polarised me instantly: against Argentina. Lord Kitchener couldn’t have come up with something more effective.

Yet the ad could have made its point while also communicating that Argentinians have a sense of humour. Why’s that important? Because I'm sure that British people would find it a lot harder to support a war against people who they think have a similar sense of humour to themselves.

To rally the Argentinians, while keeping British fence-sitters firmly (if slightly uncomfortably) on the fence, all the ad needed was a smarter endline: “This August, we’ll lay claim to all their islands.”

Provocative, but with just enough wit to make their point without being crassly warlike.

*Of course, the fact that the best athlete they could find to represent Argentina's medal-winning aspirations was a hockey player doesn't really augur well, but creatively that's splitting hairs.

For a better B2B copywriter, try one who’s owned one

Writing B2C copy isn’t too difficult. After all, we’re all consumers. So we can always sense-check our copy by asking ourselves whether we’d find it relevant and compelling if we were to come across it on the web or on our mat.

But most B2B copywriters have never owned a business. So they have no way of checking whether their copy is convincing enough to make a business owner risk even one pound of their company’s money.

That’s why most B2B copywriters tend to write in a fairly simplistic and patronising way. “For a better bottom line, call now” is a typical example of the genre.

Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that there are always a hundred different opportunities, demands and problems clamouring for their attention at any moment. The idea that a particular product or service is going to magically improve their cash flow with no further investments in terms of time, training or reorganisation is usually a fantasy.  

·      New, cheaper internet? Fine, but would I risk my business’s connectivity even for one hour?

·      Cheaper business insurance? Great, but how long would I have to wait for my payout?

·      Cloud computing? Brilliant, but again, 100% data availability is far more important than getting rid of my server.

I became a B2B copywriter only after running my own business. So I know what it’s like to negotiate the tightest possible deals, to eke out your cashflow, to get a lifeline from a bank, to grow customer relationships phonecall by phonecall, to fight competitors tooth and nail, and to celebrate a major sale.

So every time I write a piece of B2B copy, I check it off in my own head to make sure it’s “real” and not a bunch of empty-sounding bullet points and platitudes. And that the copy makes it implicitly clear that the prospective customer’s business is a product of 100% commitment, not a cash cow. 

To see what I mean, read one of my B2B samples here. 

Flerm behaviour: the new brand planning paradigm

Precarious stacks of dog-eared psychology and sociology textbooks clogged the only office window, blocking the light and my view of the Yale quadrangle. In the gloom, a desk-hogging assemblage of old and new monitors showed constantly changing word- and image-clouds: the ever-updating zeitgeist as intermediated by Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook.

Professor Gluebender finally got a match alight, lent back in his duct-taped chair and puffed smoke at the stained ceiling.

I hoped my jetlag wasn’t obvious as I asked him about his research: research which looks set to overturn current advertising thought.

“Ah yes, well, you see, advertising planner and strategists have always tried to model the human consumer to an easily understandable, pattern-following animal. A flock animal, that follows a leader, for instance.”

“So you create your advertising for that leader?”

“Exactly.” Puff. “Of course it always turns out that leaders are only leaders when they champion products and causes that their flock likes. Soon as they get it wrong, their flock deserts them for someone else. So. Begs the question. If the flock has already made up its mind, how did it do so?”

“Hence the pack model?”

“Ah yes, the pack model. Where every creature in the pack is constantly working to maintain or improve its position in the pack through its likes, dislikes and alliances.  Its brand preferences, if you will.”

“And how did that go?”

“Well, humans tend to jump from pack to pack according to likes and dislikes, so the pack model didn’t go too well either, of course.”

“I’ve read of the herd model?”

“Ah.” Cough. “The herd model. Turned out the only herd-like behaviour to be found in the human world was amongst advertising planners.”

“What came next?”

“The swarm, of course. With just six rules or fewer, an infinite number of creatures can co-exist in harmony… so advertising becomes simply a matter of pressing a very few buttons in the right way.”

“And?”

“Still works for hair care products. That’s about it, though.”

“But now you’re onto something new?”

“Ahem. I like to think so. Indeed. My model assumes that you have early adopters, followers, deviants, authorities, evangelists, dependents, influencers, critics, laggards, bewilderds, confuseds, and the just plain uninterested.”

“Mmhm?”

“And then of course, they all switch roles at random intervals for no particular reason.”

“And you call your model...?”

“Flerm behaviour. For now, anyway.”

It was a long ride back to the airport.

MI6 spy-in-a-bag: 2-4-1 offer

Want to infiltrate a foreign power? Hack the Culture Secretary’s phone calls? Or just want to know what the hell’s going on?

For a limited period only, we bring you this fabulous offer of an MI6 spy – highly trained in the latest surveillance, cryptography and bondage technology – conveniently sealed into a take-anywhere, release-anywhere sports bag.

Surveillance skills include the ability to film their own buttocks! Cryptography skills are so advanced, even colleagues and police experts are powerless to discern or decipher them! And their MI6 bondage skills are simply too embarrassing to go into in any detail here.

Order now and – due to departmental staff cuts – we’ll send you not one but two spy-in-a-bags! Don’t delay, air supplies are running out fast!

Order your MI6 spy-in-a-bags now!!

Disclaimer: Should your spy-in-a-bags not be fully alive on delivery, please leave them out with the garbage, carefully separating organic from non-organic material and placing in the correct wheelie bins. Do not attempt to boil.

Getting the most from a freelance copywriter: a guide for the smaller ad or design agency

In my own experience, the majority of agency-copywriter relationships work professionally, productively and fruitfully for both parties. However, if you’ve ever had difficulty getting what you want from a freelance copywriter, this guide may show where you’ve gone wrong – and how to make it work properly next time around.

You’ve found a freelance copywriter via LinkedIn, Google or word of mouth, and now you’d like to get their unique magic working for you and your clients. Here’s how to start, and maintain, a mutually happy relationship.

1.     Call up the copywriter, introduce yourself and explain why you’ve chosen him, perhaps referring to his agency or client experience or a particular piece of work that you like. Explain how he’ll be a good fit for your agency and client base. Invite him in for a short try-out gig and agree a mutually satisfactory daily rate.

2.     When the copywriter arrives at your agency, make him feel at home by leaving him in reception for some time to orientate himself. This way, he can get a feel for the agency without any pressure. He can look around, see what kind of décor and publications the agency values and learn how your water cooler or coffee machine works.

3.     Welcome the copywriter with enthusiasm, go to a meeting room and take him through the brief. Chances are he’s brought his own writing pad and pens with him – the kind he’s most comfortable working with - and won't need access to your stationery cupboard. He will hopefully also have brought his own laptop, in which case, great, it saves a lot of IT bother on your end – and on his side, he won’t have to fiddle around creating a new account and so on. He’ll probably need access to your WiFi though – someone can sort that out for him later.

4.     Once you’ve gone through the brief and dealt with the copywriter’s suggestions about adding a proposition to the brief, make sure he has enough workspace to get on with the job. Giving him his own desk is obviously ideal, but you can also put him between two of your staff, so each ends up with two-thirds of a desk, which is almost as good as each having a whole desk. 

5.     Something to consider: until the copywriter gets used to your work environment, he will probably find your office chit-chat a bit distracting. So it’s a good idea to position him as close as possible to your server: the ‘white noise’ will help him stay focused. And if it’s the middle of winter, the heat will be welcomed.

6.     Having his own laptop, the copywriter will obviously not be able to access your network printer. This is another mutually beneficial thing. Because rather than print out his own copy to check over and craft, he’ll have to email it to you to print out. You can then see exactly how he’s doing, forward the copy to colleagues and your line manager, collate comments and come straight back to him with your own headline suggestions and copy tweaks – all before lunch.

7.     By the end of the day, you’ll probably find that your copywriter is fine with email conversations about copy tweaks and new briefs, rather than bothering with face-to-face communication. This means that he won’t even need to work in-house, a huge advantage for both of you. You can negotiate an hourly rate, meaning that you won’t have to pay for any downtime caused by delays and meetings on your end – and he doesn’t have the bother of a commute.

8.     It’s commonly known that freelancers are typically quite flush and will thus happily help to buffer your agency’s cashflow. The copywriter will obviously bill you as and when he completes your projects, but you will only need to pay him when he actually requests payment (and even this is open to some flexibility). The first payment request is likely to be at 30 days, but obviously, every extra day is a plus for your agency finances. It is never wise to pay your copywriter too quickly, as once he is no longer owed money by your agency he has less incentive to drop everything for the next brief you send through.

9.     As your copywriter becomes more familiar with your clients, you will find that you can spend less time developing and refining your copy briefs. By simply sending pdfs of reference material and urls of related websites, you can brief him perfectly adequately and create more valuable time for your real work.

10. As time goes by, you will inevitably find that your copywriter’s eagerness to put his other clients aside for your briefs will wane to some extent. It is then imperative that you rekindle the spark. An ideal way to do this is to remotivate him with a pitch project. Not a pitch in which your agency is pitching for a client, but a copy pitch – in which your copywriter writes part of a job on spec and quotes for the rest should his initial work be approved by your client. Obviously, the more information you send him the better, and it’s probably best not to provide too tight a steer on the job – after all, it’s always interesting to see what a copywriter comes up with when given an open brief. (This modus operandi is obviously perfect for when you’re actually not quite sure what your client is after in the first place.)

11. Nothing lasts forever. So it may now be time to revisit LinkedIn or Google to find yourself a new copywriter. No problem: using this handy guide, and the valuable experience you have gained in its application, you can be sure that you will have no problem initiating and developing a new and mutually beneficial agency-copywriter relationship.

Ecclestone’s Bahrain F1 Grand Prix PR cock-up

On the day before the Bahrain F1 Grand Prix, you have to ask: how did Ecclestone get it so wrong?

Instead of siding with another repressive regime, he could have used the Bahrain Grand Prix as a massive PR opportunity: a real opportunity to change people's lives.

Bahrain’s ruler had already agreed to a negotiated list of reforms – but since ignored them. Ecclestone could have pushed hard to bring these back on the table in a ‘this is what you’ll do or you’ll never have the Grand Prix again’ gambit.

It would have had a fairly good chance of working: I get the impression that Bahrain’s royal family cares far more about hosting a Grand Prix than denying human rights to their subjects.

Instead Ecclestone’s gifted Bahrain’s activists with a golden opportunity to get the publicity they’re so desperately seeking – but at the inevitable price of who knows how many lives?

Especially after that Yates bloke has astonishingly given the Bahrain goons a rubber stamp to machine gun their population… (something that doesn’t bode well for next time the G20 rolls into London either, obviously, if his views are shared by his old colleagues).

I’m not an F1 fanatic but I watch a fair number of races. But a lot of people like myself will be finding something else to do on Sunday afternoons now.

And the message for any other big-bucks sport is now clear: you can’t avoid activists using your events for their own ends, but, managed correctly, you can make a huge difference to how that affects the general public’s perception of your sport.

For F1, FIFA and the IOC (and many others), autocracy is now looking like a very outdated strategy.

Global adjectival recall announced

Announcing the new 'new'

The glory days of the super-selling adjective 'new' are long over – in fact, marketers admit that its salespower has been waning since the late 60s. Now, finally, its global recall and replacement can commence.

Assigned to craft a replacement for the soon-to-be-retired adjectival workhorse 'new', copywriter Alistair McKechnie of Londoncopy.co.uk scoured the natural world in the search for inspiration.

Plumbing the depths

Work with psycholinguists led to an exploration of the animal kingdom for a 'sonic archetype' with universal appeal. Puffins, meerkats and kittens were all shortlisted, but the winning 'soundbit', as tested on a group of boutique-jaded WAGs, proved to be a vocalisation from a Cardiff Bay dolphin.

All together now... dolphins pitch in for the ad industry

 

The winning sound sample

Transliterated into the Roman alphabet, the sound sample is best expressed as 'Faa'. A worldwide recall and replacement scheme is now underway to replace the defective advertising power-word 'new' with its successor. The examples below show how the new adjective could soon be used:

First with the faa: predicting a self-inflating sales bubble

 

FTSE climbs as industry prepares to embrace the 'faa'
With the FTSE 100 climbing out of its recent lows on the news, a number of product launches and promotions are being readied to take advantage of the adjectival roll-out currently underway. As one marketing director remarked, 'The upturn starts here.'

First come, first served

Larger corporations will not be given any advantage over their smaller rivals. And local economies stand to gain too. Mothballed Welsh coal mines are re-opening to store the lorry-loads of printed 'news', and thousands of obsolete PC hard drives are being brought back into service to store the digital teraflops-worth expected in the biggest ad word scrappage scheme since the withdrawal of 'gusto'.

From the man in the street
Asked for their reaction to the neophyte adjective, consumers have already taken to using it with enthusiasm, even if their usage is still a little unpolished. Asked how much difference they thought the word would make to their lives, a group of builders immediately replied: 'Faa call. Faa call.'

Register for your adjective recall and replacement now

Or visit Londoncopy.co.uk

Why is the UK Conservative Party’s propaganda so poor?

“We’re in all in this together”: a gift to the left wing.

“The greenest government ever”: looking more hypocritical every single day.

And finally, “the big society”: the rotting but still-breathing corpse of this slogan has finally been given the stake through the heart by the recent charity-tax-cap muddle.

This isn’t a diatribe against the Conservative government. Who knows, history may yet show that they only appear to be a three-legged man in an Olympic final and they’re actually Usain Bolt after all. No, this isn’t a criticism of their policies, it’s a criticism of their embarrassingly poor communications with the public.

This is the government that famously employed ‘nudge thinking’ experts, then sold us a ‘pay what you can, when you can’ university funding scheme as ‘university will now cost you £9,000 a year, OK?’ – instantly deterring thousands of young people from helping themselves to a great education.

But what can you expect when their main communications strategy was simply to keep News International onside by hiring Andy Coulson – a mediocre red-top editor trying to do the job of a PR strategist?

And now that every newspaper in the country seems to be gunning for them, they don’t seem to have anyone they can rely on for soundbites anymore, let alone a real communications policy.

Even Polly Toynbee is so embarrassed by their feeble attempts to explain the proposed tax cap on charitable donations that she’s having a go*.

In a country that’s absolutely stuffed with real marketing and communications experts, it’s just unbelievable.

*Although she still hasn’t quite got to the nub, which seems to be that you can pay tons of money to your own charitable foundation, staffed with your own family, get 100% tax relief, and government will still kick in an extra 25%.

Online / email copy: best practice, best shpractice

Copywriting is anything but a science, but the digital consultants couldn’t care less. As far as they’re concerned, because you can chop online copy into boxes and derive statistics from it, success is best achieved through following rules and ‘best practices’.

Rubbish.

What the consultants call ‘best practice’ can only be discerned from whatever has been done in the past. But as everyone knows, the more often you do something in the marketing world, the less effective it becomes.

And ‘best practice’ has no way of assigning numerical values to ‘interesting’ or ‘new’ or ‘creative’. So these factors can’t be figured into ‘best practice’.

So when a creatively written email beats a generic email, the number cruncher will decide that it’s because of the position of the call to action, or the length of the paragraphs.

Whatever makes a nice chart.

Most ‘best practice’ is just common sense. But an awful lot of it is just an excuse for generic, boring, inbox filler... machine copy.

Next time your email isn’t read, don’t ask if it was ‘best practice’. Ask if it was provocative.

(This isn’t to say that split runs aren’t a good idea to see what works best. Just don’t let the results dictate what you think is good or bad practice from then on.)

In the meantime, check out MIT mathematician Tom Lehrer on the subject of sociology as a science.

Trenton Oldfield: guerilla marketing genius

Well, Trenton Oldfield set out to get under the establishment’s skin and he’s succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

For the price of a wetsuit he got way more than his 15 minutes on national TV, plus an escalating pile of column inches in the press.

What’s more, the ‘establishment’ has unwittingly colluded with his aims by taking his message viral on Facebook and Twitter. Every time someone calls him a ‘c**t’ or pleads for his immediate execution (and I’m amazed at how many do), his message is reinforced and amplified for those sympathetic to his views.

So whether you like his viewpoint or not, you have to admit his campaign is having an incredible result.

Even if everyone stops banging on about Trenton today, he’ll be given another feast of media space during the Olympics and at next year’s boat race.

In the meantime, he’s got plenty of breathing space to bone up on his media skills and push his story in more traditional media, where he’s now assured of a readership that’ll let him convert his ‘awareness’ into ‘sales’, at his leisure.

So what’s the message? Fearless, provocative and subversive guerilla marketing can succeed beyond all expectation. 

And of course, having a name that adds fuel to the fire doesn’t hurt either.

Giving interviewers your Facebook password...

Got a call yesterday from a ‘number withheld’ number. That normally means a large-ish ad agency. Turns out it was indeed an agency, one I hadn’t heard of before: Ouagadougo.

Anyway they had a major financial comms project they needed to source a copywriter for, they liked my online portfolio, and now was I up for a brief phone interview? What, right away? Well, sure.

First question was a zinger. “Given the following series of numbers, what’s next in the sequence? 1, 2, 3, 4…?”

Whoa. I’ve read all about those Google interview questions where the easiest answer is always wrong, you have to think outside the box. So this was tricky.

I thought and thought. Then it hit me.

“Got it! ‘One’ has one ‘e’, ‘two’ has no ‘e’, ‘three’ has two ‘e’s, ‘four’ has no ‘e’s, so the next in the sequence is a number with three ‘e’s… eleven!”

“Ah, OK, that’s good, really good,” came the reply. “Yeah, you’ve passed with flying colours.”

“Great, tell me about the brief,” I said.

“Ah, just one thing… you see, this brief is kind of confidential and it’s really important that we can trust you completely… so, ah, it’s just a formality but we’d need your Facebook login password just to check, you know, that… you know, we can trust each other.”

Logical, I guess, so I gave them my login. I could always change it later. I mean, I’m no fool.

“Well, that’s great… and the final thing is… well, you have no idea how paranoid our client is about security and this is a very sensitive financial account. So we just also need your bank account login, you know, your telephone banking details. Just so we’re able to reassure our client that there’s no odd transactions on your account in the last couple of weeks. So embarrassing but…”

Well, I’ve been put through some crazy hoops by clients myself, so I could really feel for the poor guy, having to ask me for my bank security details. So what could I do, I dug them out of my filofax.

“OK, that’s great, I’m sure there won’t be a problem, you’ve been a real help, we’ll email you the NDA in a couple of minutes, if you can just sign it and email it back to us, then we’re on.”

I put the phone down. Yeeha. A new client. I got a cup of coffee to celebrate, then, for a laugh, clicked on Facebook to see what trivia my new client would be seeing.

And couldn’t log on. Must be something wrong with Facebook today. Hope I can access my bank account, I’ve got a couple of bills to pay.

Lewis Carroll, the client from hell

Just been to see an exhibition of John Tenniell’s timeless illustrations for Alice in Wonderland at the Barnet Arts Depot. (Well, they’re prints from the original set of woodcuts, seems that the actual illustrations get kind of destroyed in the process.)

Now I’d always imagined that Lewis Carroll (or Charles Dodgson, as he was called in the flesh) would have been as delighted with Tenniell’s work as everyone else. But no.

Turns out that Dodgson made Tenniell do most of the illustrations over and over, changing Alice’s clothing, the characters’ ages and faces, again and again. And although he finally (grudgingly) approved them all, he was never entirely happy.

Apparently the one and only illustration he was completely pleased with was the one of Alice and Humpty Dumpty. (Maybe because it didn't show Alice's face?)

The only illustration of Tenniell's that Dodgson was completely happy with!

And then, when it came time to get the second Alice book published, Dodgson demanded a different illustrator. Fortunately his publisher put his foot down and Tenniell’s Alice lived again.

Today, of course, the idea that Tenniell’s illustrations aren’t exactly right is like questioning the shape of Ben Nevis. The illustrations simply are.

But I can kind of feel a little sympathy for Dodgson. While he was writing the book, he must have had a crystal clear image in his mind of how Alice, and Wonderland, and all the other characters, looked.

And when he saw Tenniell’s versions, he must have realized that his own vision would never see the light of day. Anyone who read the book would carry away with them Tenniell’s vision, not his own.

And who knows what Dodgson actually saw in his own mind, and how he would have drawn it if he’d only had the talent? I’m sure it would have been as surreal as his writing. But we’ll never know.