Sign On The Dotted Lion, Epigraphs, aphorisms and quotes with teeth

Something I adverted to recently has come to  be.

I thought that the phrase Sign on the Dotted Lion originated with me, but apparently, Afferbeck Lauder beat me to it. No matter, his was a throw-away line, while my dotted lion was a vicious instrument of bureaucratic warfare.

As a biologist, I had learned the art of stippling, using clouds of dots to compose an image. Having been dragged into the bureaucracy, I found packs of nervous drones who dared not make a move, and dragged brighter minds down to their level. In a Committee on Publications, we spent three years drafting a publications policy, and published nothing. 

I found that slowly emerging images done with a Rotring pen on crisp white paper distracted them, and that stopped me erupting in righteous wrath. Elsewise, I would have roared about Gutenberg being delayed while policies were drafted on manuscript specs, binding procedures, bookshelf design rukes  andregulations on paper colours. I didn't, but I came close, and I drew this lion.

Early this year, I created a T-shirt, which is available to select friends who appreciate the surrealism of Rene Magritte and his Ceci N'est Pas Un Pipe: the top line on the shirt design was the idea of my colleague-in-crimes committed in and on committees, Ian Munro.

Well that made me decide to use the originsl as a book cover, and that's the whole story. The book itself is what old-time scholars call a commonplace book. So how is it to be used?

Ask yourself, where would you go to find bits like the samples below to kick off an essay, a talk, a chapter or a book?

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
— Richard W. Hamming, Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers, 2nd edition, 1973.

We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist.
— William Whewell, (1794-1866), writing in 1840.

Descended from the apes? My dear, we will hope it is not true. But if it is, let us pray that it may not become generally known.
— Alleged to have been said by the wife of a canon of Worcester Cathedral.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
— Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835 – 1910). Following the Equator.

My poor Swomee-Swans...why, they can’t sing a note! No one can sing who has smog in his throat…
— Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr Seuss, 19045 - 1991), The Lorax.

Take your chance on ozone. There isn’t any such thing anyway. Or, if there is, you can buy a Thermos bottle full for five cents, and put it in your cupboard.
— Stephen Leacock ‘How to live to be 200’ in Literary Lapses, 1910.

The poor world is almost six thousand years old …
— William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It, IV, i, 95

Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.
— II Chronicles 4:2. (so pi = 3?)

In the data set 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 4, 6, 10, the mode is 1, the median is 2, and the mean is 3, so what is the average?
— Duncan Bain, ‘Being Mean’, Fruitgrowers’ Gazette, 1 April 1998, 1729.

This is certain, I never knew a man’s eye plucked out of his head, but he fell to vomiting upon it, and the stomach cast up all within it.
— Gaius Plinius Secundus (23-79) The Natural History, translated by Philemon Holland, 132.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
— Walter Bagehot (1801 – 1859), Physics and Politics.

Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?
— Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat.

Chemistry without catalysis, would be a sword without a handle, a light without brilliance, a bell without sound.
— Alwyn Mittasch (1869 – 1953), Journal of Chemical Education, 1948, 531-2.

… Lord Rayleigh claims that beginners in research also should be “graduates in the school of string and sealing wax”.
— Nature 154, 392–393 (1944)

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
— Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774), The Deserted Village.

1764: it was stated that a patient in Padua had been cured of rabies by drinking three pints of vinegar.
— Cases and Cures of the Hydrophobia, selected from the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1807, 48.

And many a Jakke of Dovere hastow soold,
That hath been twies hoot and twies coold.
— Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1345 – 1400), Canterbury Tales, ‘The Cook’s Prologue and Tale’.

I find not any science that doth fitly or properly pertain to the imagination.
— Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Of the Advancement of Learning, second book, XI, 3, 1605.

The answer is simple: to find more like this, you get into my private collection  of pithy comments, my commonplace file, which has been running for more than fifty years. The catch: it has always been private, but as I approach Advanced Middle Age (quite unwillingly). I am sharing some tools of the trade, and so the file is now out as an ebook, Sign on the Dotted Lion, and there is also a dead-tree version as well, only in paperback for now

Where do you get it? Amazon, of course. I have made the e-book extra cheap to suit the needs of penurious scribblers and scholars, the paperback is for gifting or maybe libraries, but I am in Italy right now so the hardback, better suited to libraries, will be a little later, probably late June.

I published through Amazon, because mainstream commercial publishers are leery of octogenarian authors. As we Ancients know, publishing is no longer a profession for gentlemen. Or ladies, and my concern is merely to reach a small bunch of like-minded folk, to load up some writerly types with useful ammo.

Here, you will learn what we knew about the atomic bomb in 1913 (yes, 1913!), when H. G. Wells imagined it being dropped on Berlin in the 1950s. There are about 2000 gems in the book, so have a look at the free sample from the Amazon page.

For more on bureaucracy and stipples, try this link.