It’s 85 years since Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, proposed a Book Handling Agency in The Irish Times.

On Sunday evening, Flann’s idea became reality. In a Berlin bar’s back room, Cabinet Magazine, a literary quarterly, assembled a crack team of white-coated literary experts to make your unread books look well-read – at moderate prices.

For €5 you could get an “essential” handling package including a “professional” spine-break for your book, “two commonplace page markers, 2 scholastic dog-ears; 4 underlined passages; 1 arbitrary yet discerning piece of marginalia; and 1 contextually appropriate piece of marginalia”.

The premier package added “mauling the edges” of the book with a drill and sand paper, thanks to the “vice-chiefs of abrasion (light, heavy)” as well as “one stain using cheap wine, coffee etc”, hand-applied by a “fluid dynamics specialist”.

There is a learning dimension as well:

“We learned that, to look authentic, coffee needs to be dropped at a different height than wine,” said Sina Najafi, editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine, who organised the evening and took on the professional spine-breaking.

Here is the full story, via Benen Harrington.

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