“And about bloody time!†I hear you cry. At long last, after much travail, the new Hooting Yard anthology is available. Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags contains no fewer than a hundred and one stories eked from the pea-sized but pulsating cranium of Mr Key. 340 pages, or thereabouts, packed with common sense, with a few pictures thrown in, including that old favourite the Chumpot Patent Soap label. Now you can curl up in your exciting 60’s style wickerwork seating pod, or sprawl on a lawn in a snowdrift during a winter picnic, and furrow your brow as you grapple with the exceedingly sensible doings of exceedingly sensible characters such as Dobson and Pebblehead and Tiny Enid and fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol.
Simply click on the picture to order your copy.
What, no contents listing! Everyone expects at least a contents list. Like a list of the contents! Know what I’m saying? How is anyone – like me – expected to know if my choice of Mr Key’s literary works are included in the collection. This is a collectors item. It ought to have a contents list in the advertising blurb.
Roy : Given that there are 101 stories packed into the book, it is a very long list, and a tedious task to transcribe it. On the other hand, the full contents can be seen on the Lulu site, if you click “Preview”.
Excellent, excellent … a one-click solution to all my Christmas shopping problems, as the current cant would have it. Bravo and huzzah!
Perhaps you could donate a few copies to your local community education hub?
Needless to say, I look forward to actively reading and re-reading this noble tome.
I have just had my head fitted for my first pair of spectacles…
(bi-focal…)
No longer will I have to resort to having Mr. Keys exciting prose read to my by an aged crone and her lamp holding urchin…
i’ve ordered a copy as an unusual but sound Christmas present.
Many thanks to all of you for supporting a lowly scrivener.
The postal person, with due Gravitas and Punctilio, has just brought my order to the door. I cannot vouch for his Rectitude but he was certainly carrying a Pippy Bag.
These are handsome, weighty books, and they promise many delightful hours of perplexitude and cackling. Many, many, many hours, if I read all the copies he’s delievered … but that would be greedy.
Any chums of mine who happen to read this should know that my Christmas shopping has happened astonishingly early this year … why, the fairy lights in the shopping mall have been shining for only a couple of weeks.
Hats off to Mr Key, say I.
I now have a collection of morally inspiring Hooting Yard publications and want to canvas suggestions for a reliable book-binder to enshrine these tomes for posterity…
I’d prefer the candidates to be wizened, hunched and extravagantly bouffanted…
O.S.M.
Should you actually wish to have a custom bound copy of these books, we can arrange to have a PDF produced to whatever dimensions you require with the correct layout.
Incidentally, I suggest that the book be printed on foolscap parchment.
Merzupials play off Key. Soon I will too? Thanks for writing!
Frank, does this set of stories include any of the ones from previous publications, like Befuddled by Cormorants?
Mamacita : No repeats. Each of the books contains a different set of stories. Buy them all!
Mamacita : PS – I ought to have clarified that there are no repeats in the paperbacks. The “By Aerostat…” ebook is a compendium (with a terrific introduction by Roland Clare) with contents drawn from the entire Hooting Yard canon.
Thank you!! I’ve bought some paperbacks and will be back for more!