Augustus Whipple

The animal known as a P.I.G. 

So I might not have been updating this blog as much as I want to but I am still volunteering at Ham and I keep on finding things I want to talk about but today I found something WONDERFUL! (Maybe too much excitement, you can judge later.)

So today I was in the library for the first time and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I liked the fact Mr Norman Norris from Brighton bequeathed all his books to the trust when he died and they gave them to Ham, since our book collection had been sold in 1938, and some to nearby Osterley Park. I also loved the globes with their inaccurate portrayal of Australia being connected to the mainland, the misshapenness of certain countries (according to one visitor they just couldn't get the longitude right (or was it latitude) until they had accurate time pieces apparently) and the wonderful old names like New Holland for Australia.

But the thing that struck me was a book just at eye height on the end of the shelf entitled "On the Care of the Pig" by Augustus Whipple. Well not only is Augustus Whipple such a fantastic name but it reminded me of P.G Wodehouse's Blandings novels in which Lord Emsworth is obsessed by pigs. I loved the 1995 TV adaptation as a child which was how I got into Wodehouse. While I was revelling in this discovery and thinking that I had to check it out on the internet because it seems the pig obsession just might be the 'in' thing, I saw that the book was only half a book with a piece of wood at the back. There was one of these on the other side of the shelf and on some of the other ones.

When I went on my break I asked Gwen one of the House Steward she said it was because when Ham recieved Norman Norris's collection he had a lot of smaller books which didn't fit on the big bookshelves so they added shelves and the wooden bits I saw were brackets and the half books were there to disguise them. So she confirmed that "On the Care of the Pig" was not a real book and I was very sad about this.

HOWEVER when I googled it I made a wonderful discovery and found this on Wikipedia. August Whipple (or Whiffle I can't work out which one's better) DOES have something to do with Wodehouse and Blandings. "On the Care of the Pig" is Lord Emsworth's favourite reference book for looking after his beloved Empress of Blandings.

So whoever designed that fake book hid an obscure cheeky little Blandings reference which I sort of got and I love them for it. I now need to check out if any of the other fake half books are hiding sneaky references. Though to be fair with a name like Augustus Whipple, I should have guessed Wodehouse had a hand in it. His characters have wonderful names. Now I am off to fill to read as much Wodehouse as I can. Pig hoooey!