The Curious Incident of the Legless Chair
April 6, 2009
Some months ago, one of our coveted leather easy chairs developed a hitch in its giddy up. That is, one of its legs became loose and fell off, rendering the chair out of action. In order to prevent disaster, we fashioned a sign, innocently proclaiming the chair legless and not to be sat upon.
We had a not indifferent response. Firstly, the sign was amended in Biro to caution, ‘You too will feel drunk if you try it.’ Then the odes started coming in. Ok, so there were only two of them, but still. One was called ‘Chair of Poetry’, and celebrated the chair, ‘drunk with the weight of words’. The other, simply entitled, ’In the Poetry Library’, lamented a missed opportunity to sit on such a comfortable looking article, ‘well-worn by bibliophile bottoms.’ Quite.
The chair has featured in Issue 4 of our Poetry Reader (’25 things you didn’t know about the SPL’) and its current status well-documented photographically. Robyn remarked, at a staff meeting, that it was ‘an episode in the life of the library which needn’t continue’, and so it is that we turn to a joiner friend, and bid adieu to the curious incident of the legless chair.
Please do not sit here. This chair is legless and awaiting repair.
