(1880s?, City of London Publishing Company)
'Things I Have Blown' is a curious little 52 page book published at an unknown date in the late 19th century. The title suggests it is a catalogue of failures - a list of the author's ill-fated ventures.It is in fact a narrative told by the pseudonymous 'A Piper' chronicling the many wind and reed instruments he has literally blown, along with the more "exotic" instruments blown in India and Egypt. The book would have benefited greatly from illustrations, or at least some worldly knowledge, as there are quite a few passages where 'A Piper' has no idea what instrument he is blowing but proceeds to describe its sonority and how uncomfortable it feels, whilst neglecting any details of the instrument's construction. Bizarrely, the author damns several instruments on first blow, without mentioning whether or not he has heard them played by an experienced player beforehand. One such instrument fails to meet his approval...
"A boat-man brought me a Zourna: one of the most loathsome, offensive primitive instruments I have had the misfortune to put to my lips, giving such an insolent currish noise I thought it better employed as a back-scratcher"
He seems a little ungrateful to the boat-man. We are told with gusto that the author is an "accomplished musician, singularly adept on all wind instruments known to man", but surely an instrument such as the "zourna" (or zurna), removed as it is from the Western equal tempered scale, would take years of practice to master the playing technique?
The last twelve pages of the book diverge from accounts of things blown, to describe an incident in Edinburgh where he had money stolen by a "despicable pedlar" - a knife-wielding conman with a dog, in fact - who promised to show him "a fine set of Northumbrian pipes that, I was told, were stowed in a cellar" where the author was lured, only to be divested of his valuables by threats of violence. It may or may not be relevant to note that the embossed title on the cover has a knife-blade style typeface.
The book, presumably non-fiction, is written in a diary format - a collection of prosaic observations and flatly expressed personal opinions on types of instruments. 'A Piper' has seemingly published the book for his own amusement, as no attempts are made to orientate the reader, such is the disjointedness of the text. 'Things I Have Blown' reads very much like a Victorian Twitter feed. We are not told why the author is travelling to Egypt or India, and so it appears as if he is a musical tourist - travelling the world to give pithy judgement on various wind instruments he encounters. What is most striking is the amount of background information we are not given! The author's situation and the era it was written makes this book quite unusual indeed... A rare piece of (wonky) social history. It would be interesting to find out the true identity of 'A Piper'.
As no information on this book can be found anywhere, I feel compelled to write about it, if only to let it be known that it exists. COPAC and Worldcat indicate that no library in the world appears to have a copy. One day I hope to upload a full scan of it.
What makes this little book even more curious is that web-research reveals that the 'City of London Publishing Company' was a vanity publisher set up by a gang of swindlers to despoil budding authors. The City of London Publishing Co. did publish books in limited quantity however, as many libraries carry their books (mostly poetry) yet there is no sign of 'Things I Have Blown', nor of anything else by 'A Piper'. Perhaps immediately after publication the author destroyed copies out of sudden embarrassment? But it does seem that after the Northumbrian pipes swindle, 'A Piper' was again swindled by this shady publishing firm, and that if he wanted his book to make an impression with the wider public, he has, by all appearances, "blown it".
