Hello!
First, housekeeping. I've set up a Mastadon account to replace Twitter but I haven't had much time to play with it yet. You can find me at @karloff@mstdn.social. I'll keep the Twitter live for a bit to give me time to clear out bookmarks and deal with any DMs that come in, but in time I'll deactivate the Twitter.
Second, thanks to those who responded to the poll! A lot of you like the Bookhounds content so that's what I'll be concentrating on first. There were some votes for Swords of the Serpentine too, so that will be on the menu as well.
To start off with, something light but tasty.
In the Forgotten London series I often use my copy of London Curios, a book published long long ago that I picked up for a fiver when I was last in Greenwich. I turn to a random page and use whatever's there as inspiration for a seed.
Someone was kind enough to give me a copy of a Ward & Lock London Guide Book for Christmas, so I thought it only fitting to try the same trick in the first post of 2023. It was either that or an extended riff on Kevin McCarthy, and I think we're all sick of his Speaker's Odessey by now. Not least because we'll have it all to do again when they kick him out, which should happen within the next month or two.
Page 101: In Buckingham Palace Road are the National School of Cookery, the St. George's Baths and the Free Library; and the Royal Sanitary Institute ...
The National School of Cookery gets its start at the Crystal Palace Exhibition and for a while is based there. It gets a mention in Dickens's Dictionary Of London where, Dickens says, Miss Mary Hooper was entrusted with the formation of a new series of classes for instruction in cookery and every branch of domestic economy. Mary Hooper is herself a writer of no little skill and publishes a number of cookbooks and novels, particularly children's fiction. The school finally finds a more permanent home on Buckingham Palace Road in 1889, where it stays until its eventual collapse in 1962 due to lack of funds.
It specializes in two kinds of cookery: Plain, for the working class, and High Class, for those prepared to pay for fancy food. The High Class cookbook was a moderately expensive production for its time, with gold-blocking on spine and its green leather cover; this was reprinted many times and later editions were in paperback, but the earliest versions were all hardback. Mrs. Clarke, the superintendent of the school, was the person who compiled the recipes.
Dickens - Boz, the son of, not the author - had several children, among them Ethel Kate Dickens, entrepreneur and businesswoman who died of an overdose in 1936. She would have known Mary Hooper, who edited Household Words, the mid-nineteenth century magazine which her grandfather Charles Dickens, the celebrated author, was involved with.
From that we get:
Four And Twenty Blackbirds
A Bookhounds of London scenario seed.
Several well-heeled collectors have become convinced that there is a special 1896 errata edition of the High Class Cookery Recipes etc published by the National School of Cookery. These culinary book lovers are joined in the chase by an eclectic selection of melopolisomancers who are convinced the 1896 errata edition can be a useful tool in their craft. Both groups believe the errata edition will be sold at a secret auction at the National School of Cookery on the anniversary of Charles Dickens' death in 1896.
The errata edition allegedly contains an extra recipe penned by Dickens himself - or possibly his son, accounts vary. Those who claim to have seen it - and there are few - say that it describes a peculiar feast involving meats and fruits not seen on Earth.
Those who say the book either assists in megapolisomancy or provides a kind of lever claim that the book itself has direct, deep links to the National School of Cookery, which means it has links to Buckingham Palace Road which means it can be used in any working involving the Royal Mews or Victoria Station, two high-profile London landmarks, and for that matter any number of lesser landmarks also on Buckingham Palace Road. Or it can be used as a kind of divining rod to discover old levers from the time this area was Chelsea Road, home to highwaymen and bandits.
Those who trace the rumors about the book to their source discover that the source is Ethel Kate, and depending on when the chronicle is set she may still be alive.
A short while before these rumors arose she claimed to have dreamed of a peculiar book, a cookbook, in which the most fabulous recipes could be found. At one point in her dreams her grandfather presented her with a copy of this book, at which point it somehow escaped her dream and became reality. She doesn't know how this happened and is frightened of the result.
Options:
- Ethel Kate is a Dreamer and may or may not have had contact with the Surrealist Dreamhounds of Paris. Her dreaming and waking lives are very different. In her waking life she runs a typists school; in her dreams she is an artist of repute. However, in the course of her dreaming career she found herself in a dream equivalent of the cooking school, where she discovered - or created - this book. Now she doesn't know what to do with it, or why it's here in the waking world. In this version the book is a special artefact which may or may not have the powers ascribed to it by megapolisomancers, but it frightens the hell out of Dickens' granddaughter.
- The cookbook was created by a megapolisomancer who drew on Ethel Kate's dreams of her grandfather to create it. However, the book isn't an artefact; it's a trap, for a rival megapolisomancer. The creator of the book is the one who's spreading the rumors and holding the auction at the cooking school, the intent being to lure the rival out of hiding and bring them to a place of execution - and woe betide anyone else who happens to be nearby. Collateral damage is a terrible thing ...
- The cookbook was created by a Dust Thing who, among other aspects, is partly Charles Dickens Jr., or Boz. In his lifetime Boz was a financial failure, an aspect which the Dust Thing inadvertently draws on. That's one of the reasons why the School of Cookery enjoys such poor fortune; they get it from the Dust Thing. Its original book is a copy of Boz's Dictionary of London: An Unconventional Handbook, which the Director of the School keeps in her personal library; if this book is destroyed the Dust Thing is significantly diminished. The cookbook is the Dust Thing's version of a fund raiser, and the Dust Thing will be the auctioneer. Ethel Kate is aware of this through dreams and is doing her (limited) best to prevent the auction, as she feels it is likely to end badly.
No comments:
Post a Comment