"Massachusetts poet J. Lorraine Brown has used an unusual image in “Tintype on the Pond, 1925.” This poem, like many others, offers us a unique experience, presented as a gift, for us to respond to as we will. We need not ferret out a hidden message. How many of us will recall this little scene the next time we see ice skates or a Sunday-dinner roast?

Tintype on the Pond, 1925

Believe it or not,
the old woman said,
and I tried to picture it:
a girl,
the polished white ribs of a roast
tied to her boots with twine,
the twine coated with candle wax
so she could glide
uninterrupted
across the ice—
my mother,
skating on bones.

Reprinted from “Eclipse” by permission of the author. Poem copyright (c) 2004 by J. Lorraine Brown. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

In the real world, some advertisements, prepublication announcements, prospectus, promotions, statements of “work in progress,” and even published book titles may offer false hope, and create fiction. Here are some recently discovered examples.

While A New Catalogue of the Books of the Publick Library of the City of Norwich in the Year 1732. . .Together with an account of Mr. John Kirkpatrick’s Roman and other coins is very informative on the history, early acquisitions, and donations to a provincial English library (and on how early eighteenth century knowledge was organized), the volume contains nothing about Roman coins (other than in the title of the book).

A 1908 letter recounted, “I have no money to invest in the History of the 78th, I subscribed for a book three or four years ago and have heard nothing from it. It seems to me that it is rather late in the day for a History of that kind.” There is no evidence that this book on the 78th Regiment ever appeared.

Hugh F. Gillespie, law professor and Creighton Law Library Director from 1917 to 1948, noted in 1931 in the Docket that Repertorium Juridicum, A General Index to all the cases and pleadings in Law and Equity (London: 1787) contained an advertisement to the “Second Part” that promised to be an invaluable subject index to legal cases. It never appeared and it would be many years before America produced the Key-Number System of American Digests, the standard research guide for lawyers until the advent of electronic sources such as Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis.

Wisdom, a glossy pseudo-intellectual magazine in 1964 advertised No. 40 on Shakespeare, took advance publication subscriptions, and never appeared, raising questions of mail fraud.

Law School Dean Stephen Frankino and C. Benjamin Crisman wrote a brief history of Creighton University School of Law in the Creighton Law Review, in 1974. A footnote contained an unfulfilled promise, “This is a brief summary of a longer history of the Creighton University School of Law in preparation by the authors.”

In 1982 I won the Nathan Burkan Memorial Competition ASCAP award for “Public Lending Rights,” arguing that continuing royalties should be paid on the multiple use of books purchased by libraries. A journal (without soliciting me) gratuitously announced that the essay would be published. I was flattered, but the article never appeared.
William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, honoring England’s first printer William Caxton, published the Golden Legend and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but did not live long enough to print the Bible. Joseph R. Dunlap’s The Book that Never Was (1971) recounts unfulfilled Morris projects. The unexecuted plans of the great typographer John Henry Nash are reported in Chapter Nine, The Vulgate Bible & Other Unfinished Projects of John Henry Nash, by Robert D. Harlan (1982).

The failure of projects to reach fruition may be the result of the author’s, illustrator’s or publisher’s death, failure to deliver, get along, find adequate financing, or loss of interest. Contact OBPOMNI@aol.com to share information about nonexistent publications.