This June a Research Grant recipient is in residence looking at alphabets in the reading room.  Not just a handful, but as many as possible—and Cotsen has literally hundreds, even thousands.  All the paging promises the fun of discovering something new in the collection.  It took a little time to chase down this print, an alphabet that also makes refers to Noah’s Ark, making it squarely in scope for Cotsen.  The wry contents note written by the donor’s private librarian with this one word “excrement” signaled that it might be something out of the ordinary.

“A-Z” by Christopher Orr.

The  panel in the  lower right hand corner announces that this is the third printing of “A-Z” below a whimsically scratchy illustration of a whale swimming parallel to Noah’s ark, with the animals hanging their heads over the gunwhales.   Floating to the left of Noah holding his nose is the caption “Imagine what the smell there must have been,” a thought which has probably occurred to most people between the ages of four and eighty-four if they bother to think very hard about the logistics of keeping two of every species in crowded quarters for over a month.

Now look at the subjects for “A,” “B,” and “C, which are “Ant poo, Bear smells, Cat’s nasty’s.”  The merriment continues with “hedgehog pellets,” “llama lumps,” “owl do-dads, “rabbit currants” all the way to “zebra manure.”

When the printmaker Chris Orr (1943-) printed the sheet in 1987, he had not been elected to the Royal Academician or appointed a Member of Order of the British Empire.  His Wikipedia biography (Christopher there) soberly describes himself as an “English artist and printmaker who has exhibited worldwide and published over 400 limited edition prints in lithography, etching, and silkscreen” and whose works are in the collections of the British Museum, the Tate and the Victoria and Albert. His list of publications includes several collaborations with Michael Palin. These achievements are humorously undercut with:

During my thirty nine years as an artist I have been put in various pigeon-holes, such as ‘quintessential English’ or a ‘latter-day Hogarth‘. But are these epithets reasonable? My pictures are composed of well-mixed metaphors, references, allusions, jokes and descriptions. Does ‘Chris Orr-like’ refer to a typically English muddle? The tradition of graphic eccentricity (Heath Robinson, Donald McGill, Steve Bell et al.) is fair enough…

A pretty fair description of his middle-aged jeux de pee…