Inside Jacket

Berlin was ‘bombed’ with poetry at the weekend, reports The Guardian.

I love banned books stories. Here’s a cracker from our neck of the woods here in British Columbia that I spotted in The Province newspaper. BC Ferries has banned The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon from its on-board shops because the cover features a naked arse. Check out the cover – as you can see, it’s a very nice naked bottom and the horse’s naked arse isn’t bad either.

BC Ferries is concerned because children may see this cover. Oh the horror! As a father of four-year-old and eight-year-old girls, I can vouch that children wouldn’t give a flying fig about about the arse on this book cover. I’m almost tempted to sneak into one of their bookshops and place a book with a really offensive cover (and trust me, I see plenty in this job) on their shelves.

I find this nonsense somewhat ironic as I had an eyeful of real flesh on my last BC Ferries journey. I travel on BC Ferries a great deal and just eight days ago, I was on a ship going from Vancouver to Victoria. It was sunny and we were sitting outside at the back of the boat in an area, which is effectively a sun trap. Lots of people were there – tourists, the legions of old retired people, hordes of holidaying families and so on. There was one young pretty lady who was also there enjoying the sun. She was wearing her Lululemon trousers and a bikini top. A few minutes into the voyage, she stripped off the trousers and was sunbathing in just her bikini top and bottoms. British Columbia thinks it’s a liberal place but in reality it’s pretty conservative here. After hearing the Annabel Lyon story, I’m surprised a jobsworth didn’t come along and tell Ms Bikini to get her kit back on.

I love the idea of a book made from pulp containing human blood, especially when it is Sachin Tendulkar. Books bound in human skin have been around for centuries so a pint of blood is barely anything at all – or about an armful as Tony Hancock famously said. For the sake of this blog’s North America readers, Tendulkar is bigger than Tiger Woods, bigger than Lebron James. The cricketer has millions of fans in India where cricket is the only game that matters. Of course, the publisher has sold all 10 copies at $75,000 a pop – the buyers are getting part of a sporting legend. Plus India is packed with a new generation of millionaires so the market exists. If the publisher had really wanted to go to town, they should have added some sweat and tears to the pulp.

Following on from last week’s story about Douglas Coupland’s line of clothing, an Oregon firm is producing Ernest Hemingway-branded shoes. Thomas Raymond & Co has teamed up with the writer’s son to create the handmade footwear using bison and calf hide.

Douglas Coupland – the most Canadian of Canada’s writers and an utter jack-of-all-trades – has launched a line of clothing through the Roots chain of shops. Here’s what the Toronto Star’s fashion page thinks of it.

Roots’ website dedicated to the clothing and accessories is also worth a look – but beware, all the flashy graphics made my eyes bleed. If you Tweet about Coupland and Roots then your Tweet appears in the middle of the merchandising section of the site. For a very strange moment, I was looking at a picture of myself and my Tweet in the middle of the Roots site.