According to the visitor statistics, someone arrived at Hooting Yard yesterday having searched for the term “macabre folding camp chairs”. I hasten to add that I am not making this up. I suspect what the inquirer was looking for was Dobson’s exceedingly rare Eerie & Macabre Picnic Praxis, a set of practical guidelines which appeared, oddly, as an appendix to his pamphlet A Dictionary Of Squirrels (out of print).

Unusually for Dobson, the Praxis was written in response to a request from a reader. The pamphleteer was notoriously dismissive, even contemptuous, of his audience, such as it was. Marigold Chew recalls the great man stamping about in his study, spitting into the fireplace, shouting his head off at nobody in particular and insisting that his readership was composed of spiteful lickspittles and human wreckage. He had no evidence to back this claim, of course. He just enjoyed his misanthropic ravings, as who does not?

We must wonder, then, why the pamphleteer responded with such alacrity to the letter he received from a correspondent signing himself simply as “JFK”. There are compelling reasons to believe this was the soon-to-be-assassinated thirty-fifth Potus, but that is unlikely to have impressed Dobson, who had a weird animus towards men who wore surgical braces for excruciating back pain. A devotee of the “back quack” Rastus Tebbit, whom he occasionally visited in prison, Dobson swore by the old fraud’s patent back pain remedy of lettuce, toad, and cake.

The letter itself was clear and concise. Dear Dobson, it read, I am planning to organise a picnic outing that will be both eerie and macabre, but I have no idea how to go about it. It has been suggested to me by one of my secret service agents that a pamphleteer such as yourself would be able to bash together some guidelines at the drop of a hat. Thanks in advance.

It has been estimated that throughout his long career, Dobson received no fewer than eight direct requests from readers to address a particular topic. The other seven were binned or burned or torn to shreds or, on one memorable occasion, folded into a paper aeroplane of uncommonly aerodynamic soundness and launched from atop an Alpine peak into the blue empyrean, to the applause of a gaggle of Swiss boy scouts. Yet this one letter stirred something in the pamphleteer’s brain, and he immediately sat down at his escritoire and took a newly-sharpened pencil from his pencil pot and wrote the Praxis, it is thought in a single burst of concentrated picnic prose. The subject, it should be remembered, was one familiar to him, for he had written teeming pages on picnics in earlier years. Indeed, one of the first pamphlets ever to bear Dobson’s name was entitled God Almighty, Is There Anything More Satisfying Than A Well-Executed Picnic? (out of print).

As mysterious as the enthusiasm with which he tackled a reader’s request, however, is the fact that, as soon as the Praxis was written, Dobson shoved it into a cardboard box and forgot about it. Within days, the manuscript was covered with other scribblings, and with biscuit crumbs and dust and spilled talcum powder and a cackhandedly-folded map of guillemot habitats and shells from a packet of brazil nuts and newspaper cuttings and a hiking boot catalogue until the box was full and its lid was fitted and it was consigned to a shelf in the cellar alongside dozens upon dozens of other cardboard boxes filled with a heteroclite jumble of forgotten miscellania. This habitual Dobsonian practice has proved infuriating for scholars. Perhaps it really would have been better if the whole damned lot had been burned to a cinder.

Almost a decade passed. One Thursday afternoon, during a thunderstorm, Marigold Chew remarked to Dobson that his Dictionary Of Squirrels, which she was readying for print, would, in her opinion, be immeasurably enriched by the addition of a few more pages. But Dobson had exhausted his knowledge of squirrels, and had nothing more to say. By chance, he was rummaging about searching for the map of guillemot habitats, in preparation for his next project, A Dictionary Of Guillemot Habitat Maps, and, grabbing at the Praxis, he tossed it over to Marigold, muttering something along the lines of it being a “companion piece”. This was nonsense, of course, for it is nothing of the sort. Squirrels are not even mentioned in its sixteen brief paragraphs. Marigold was skim-reading it, and about to protest that Dobson was fobbing her off with a non-squirrel-related text, when there was an almighty clap of thunder and both the pamphleteer and his inamorata were stricken with sudden terrific clap of thunder shock syndrome. Dazed and bumbling, Dobson then made things worse by insisting they both take Rastus Tebbit’s so-called “curative”, a potion of toad, cake and radish, the only effect of which was to unhinge their reason for a period of forty-eight hours. It was during this time, with her judgement impaired, that Marigold Chew printed all known copies of the Dictionary Of Squirrels, with its wholly irrelevant appendix.

Should we be glad she did so? The Eerie & Macabre Picnic Praxis is a curious work, and it is hard to see how practical the guidelines are if one is actually intent upon organising an eerie and macabre picnic. Paragraph six, for example, the one I think my visitor from yesterday was searching for, reads as follows:

Most reputable stockists of folding camp chairs will be happy to listen to any requests from you regarding eerie or macabre ranges of their merchandise. They will listen happily because they tend, as a tribe, to be happy, even when faced by plague and cataclysm. I know this much because I have seen them laugh hysterically at an approaching swarm of locusts, on more than one occasion.

As Aloysius Nestingbird, that most temperate of Dobsonists, asked, after reading this passage, “What in heaven’s name is he blathering on about?” To date, no one has given a satisfactory answer to that question.

Si bene calculum ponas, ubique naufragium est. – Gaius Petronius Arbiter. That is, “if you consider well the events of life, shipwreck is everywhere”. Nobody considered the events of life with as much rigour as the out of print pamphleteer Dobson, and he came to agree with Petronius. Indeed, late in life he became notorious for breaking up happy gatherings, such as cocktail parties and jaunty sporting occasions and infants’ birthday celebrations, by brandishing mezzotints of famous shipwrecks in the faces of those gathered and reciting, in a booming voice, The Wreck Of The Hesperus or The Wreck Of The Deutschland, or both.

The mezzotints Dobson clipped from a magazine to which he subscribed for many years. Partridge & Peacock’s Weekly Shipwreck News collected accounts of shipwrecks real and fictional, usually written in lurid prose, and illustrated them with mezzotints, many from the hand of noted mezzotintist Rex Tint. Neither Partridge nor Peacock had the slightest interest in improving safety at sea, nor did they campaign for better lifeboat provision or similar initiatives. Quite the opposite, in fact. Partridge and Peacock were a gruesome pair, who relished the horror of shipwrecks, clapping their hands in unseemly glee when they received fresh tales of maritime disaster. They employed a team of backroom scribblers to empurple and embroider the basic reports which came clicketyclacking into the office on some kind of tickertapeyfaxy gubbins the duo had themselves invented.

Dobson never wrote for the magazine, although both Partridge and Peacock begged him to do so. There was one particular winter when either or both of the creepy cousins came banging on Dobson’s door offering blandishments, but the pamphleteer never succumbed. Even in the depths of penury, he appears to have held himself aloof, which is the more curious when one considers how devoted a reader of the weekly he was. Odder still that shipwreck is one of the few topics, one of the few “events of life”, to which Dobson did not devote a pamphlet of his own. It is true that he penned more than one blitheringly infantile encomium upon mezzotintist Rex Tint’s shipwreck mezzotints, the ones he clipped so carefully from the magazine every Tuesday morning for untold years and which, late in life, he took to pressing upon the attention of jolly partygoers, but of shipwrecks in and of themselves, he wrote not a word.

Although she did not share Dobson’s macabre interest, Marigold Chew once set The Wreck Of The Deutschland to music. She was, at the time, a pupil of grim beetle-browed composer Horst Gack, who set her the task of using Father Hopkins’ great poem as the basis for a harmochronotransduction for voice, piping, valves, and flute-to-be-played-while-standing-on-one-leg. Legend has it that she tried to get Dobson to sing the words during rehearsals in a farmyard barn, but that the project had to be abandoned when cows toppled over and goats got the vapours, hens became hysterical and rooks and bluebirds plummeted from the sky.

One of the more startling works of Dobson was the text often called “the joke pamphlet”, dubbed such because its opening lines are almost identical to one of those gags that begins “There was an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotchman…” It is the least-read of Dobson’s pamphlets by a long chalk. Some think this may be due to the work itself being thought a joke, perpetrated by an anti-Dobsonist, and thus not part of the canon. Equally, it could be argued that the very rarity of the pamphlet has led to it being neglected. Most estimates conclude that only three copies were bashed out on Marigold Chew’s Gestetner machine in her crumbling shed.

The pamphlet begins thus:

There was a thnetopsychist, a psychopannychist, and an annihilationist, and they were loitering in a graveyard. The thnetopsychist held that the souls of persons and beasts perish along with their physical bodies, and that both body and soul are resurrected at the Last Judgement. The psychopannychist believed that the soul sleeps in the grave, to be awoken at the End . The annihilationist, as his name indicated, said that there was no resurrection at all, for either the body or the soul.

Clearly, any sensitive reader would not be expecting Dobson to follow this with a comic punchline. This is a serious pamphlet by a serious pamphleteer. There follows a lengthy conversation between the trio, written in stilted, artificial, and highly-wrought prose, which Dobson disastrously tries to render in a variety of regional accents, choosing regions where he had never been, and of which he knew nothing. Indeed, it may be that the pamphlet has attracted so few readers because it is virtually unreadable.

But, as ever with the out of print pamphleteer, persistence pays off. Ted Cack has gone so far as to claim that it is Dobson’s finest, bravest, most valiant work, but he is probably just showing off.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the conversation between the thnetopsychist, the psychopannychist, and the annihilationist, which makes up the bulk of the pamphlet, consists of each arguing their case against the other. But it swiftly becomes apparent that this is not Dobson’s purpose at all. Well, it becomes swiftly apparent once one gets to grips with the tortured prose, but if one has to struggle it becomes slowly apparent. (In my case, it took about seven years hard slog, sitting up all night reading by the light of tallow candles, shivering in a blanket, to reach a vague understanding of this mighty text.) Rather than a standard mortalist debate about the fate of the body and soul after death, we are treated to a sequence of what can only be called rants by the three protagonists upon familiar Dobsonian themes – shipping timetables, foreign boot manufacture, breathtaking ornithological ignorance, and so on – interspersed with passages in which ghouls rise from the tombs in the graveyard and dance a sort of tarantella.

Obviously, the pamphleteer is playing with his readers here in a quite un-Dobsonish manner. Our moorings are loosened, and we are set adrift. We wonder, or at least I wondered, by about page 44, if we were heading for a maelstrom, like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. We cling on, though, trusting in Dobson to rescue us. And rescue us he does.

In the final pages of the pamphlet, the dancing ghouls harry the thnetopsychist into one of the graves, chop up the psychopannychist with their ghoul-axes, and hoist the annihilationist up a gum tree which just happens to be growing in a corner of the graveyard and which we have glimpsed, briefly, earlier in the text, when one of the protagonists – it is not clear which, given the stultifying density of the prose – shins up it and taps it for gum to make a point about tapping gum from gum trees. The ghouls then do a final little dance – more a hopping about, in truth – before returning to their tombs. But of course, one tomb is newly occupied by the stricken thnetopsychist, leaving a single ghoul with nowhere to rest. This ghoul wanders out of the graveyard, through the grim iron gates, past the cake shop and the colonic irrigation theme park and the butcher’s and the performing pinhead person’s plinth, and then vanishes into a mist, a mist reminiscent of the one that swallows up Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The ghoul is bound we know not where, and nor does Dobson tell us.

It is, in short, a tour de force, albeit one that is maddeningly difficult to make sense of. Oddly, not one of the giants of prog rock ever adapted it for a concept album. One can only imagine what a terrific gatefold sleeve would have been designed for the original vinyl release, and with what vim adenoidal youths would have carved Dobson’s name into their school desks with a penknife. Is there, one wonders, a parallel universe where such things came to be? And is there a piece of boffinry that could take us there, away, away… away from the sludge and gristle of our hapless hell?