It’s a product worthy of Reggie Perrin’s Grot shop – the store opened to sell tat in David Nobbs’s magnificent satire of modern life: a book called Reasons to Vote Democrat by Michael J Knowles, which contains only a smattering of words – title page, contents and chapter headings – in its 265 pages. The rest is blank.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” tweeted president Donald Trump as his recommendation sent Reasons to Vote Democrat up the bestseller charts. It isn’t the only blank book produced on the back of current divisions in US politics: Oregon Democrat Cylvia Hayes got there first, with Surprising Reasons to Think That Trump Will Be a (Bigly) Great President! – 150 pages, entirely blank.
Other blank books include Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect and Admiration; Reasons to Vote for Republicans: An Incomprehensible Guide, and Reasons to Vote for Democrats. On this side of the Atlantic, the Ukip jester’s name provided the hilarious blank: in 2014, Ebury published The Wit and Wisdom of Nigel Farage (which Amazon warns, helpfully, is a “blank book”).
The biggest joke is that readers are prepared to pay for what is essentially a sketchpad with a funny jacket. That the noble art of political parody seems to have descended into a one-joke turn that avoids words – is rather unfunny. These blank books make the Ladybird parodies, and the Blyton-spoof Five on Brexit Island, look like Jonathan Swift.
Where is Henry Root when we need him? Satirist and roué William Donaldson posed as Root in the late 1970s in a delightful series of letters that hooked the nation’s biggest egos with a pound note as bait. To Margaret Thatcher, he suggested Mary Whitehouse as new home secretary; to the First Sea Lord he volunteered his services: “I’m on red alert here and can leave for my ship at the drop of a bollard.” And, to the senior Treasury counsel at the Old Bailey, after “the irresponsible behaviour of the Guardian” revealed jury fixing, he nominated himself as a juryman in certain trials. “In cases involving pornographers, blasphemers and those prone to civil agitation and disorder, you’d have at least one vote under your belt.” His proffered pound was returned.
Imagine the fun Donaldson would have had with Farage and Trump? If not Root, perhaps his precursor Humphry Berkeley, who after the second world war posed as H Rochester Sneath, headmaster of the fictitious Selhurst School, who snapped at self-important rivals in more prestigious institutions.
To the head of Marlborough College – the future alma mater of the Duchess of Cambridge – he wrote asking how he had “engineered” a visit from the royal family only to be slapped down. Of the head of Stowe, Sneath inquired if he should provide sex education to school maids, (Berkeley, an undergraduate at Cambridge, was eventually exposed after a letter in the Daily Worker led a reporter to his door.)
Constructing such complicated satirical personae took work, which paid dividends in mirth. But the only laughter I hear around blank books is that of the publishers, as they pocket the profits from books as subtle and revealing as a blow to the head. Perhaps the funniest thing to emerge from all of this is that Trump has yet to recommend a book (apart from his own) with words in it.
