#peter waring

Tragically this is the clearest shot of the book (you can watch the video here, the book appears at the 3 minute mark). It seems as though it has been intentionally blurred. We’re not ones to back down from a research challenge though!

We tried all the obvious things: it’s clearly not Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, but we weren’t having much luck finding a book with a two-word title (first word slightly shorter), whose author had a longer first name and shorter surname. (Did you know there are 1.5 million books in the Penguin archive collection?)

So we contacted [email protected] (because of course we did). They got back to us quickly, and were very helpful. 

Our correspondent Esmé tried to find a contract for any Penguin book being used in the video, but came up empty. So the Beatles didn’t get permission to use this book. Very interesting, especially since it seems to have been obscured. 

She pointed out that the combination of:

Two line book title

One line author name

Dancing penguin figure (only used between 1940 and 1950)

Is quite rare, so that really narrows the search. 

She suggested that, since it doesn’t appear to have “genre markers” on the sides, it would be from 1947 or later. However when you watch the video there may be compression artifacts (smudges) remaining of genre markers that are on the book, but not clearly visible (more on that later).

She proposed Silas Marner after having done a bit of research on her own (have we mentioned what a star she was?):

Armed with all this information we trawled the website given to us by Esmé for more suitable candidates.

The shape of the author name seriously narrows it down, and where a book might match by name, it fails to match by title. In fact, we only found three real candidates, plus the book Esmé gave us: 

Holy Terrors by Arthur Manchen

Paper Houses by William Plomer

And

Peter Waring by Forrest Reid

Just on first glance, only one of these books really had the shortness of the surname seen in the video,

But just to be sure, since the book in the video is blurred and very under saturated, we tried to replicate it:

Silas Marner, Holy Terrors

Paper Houses, Peter Waring

These are the settings we used if anyone wants to check our work:

And that blurred and compressed, the “fiction” marker really is more like a smudge, so we feel confident that we don't need to find a book with no genre marks. 

Here’s that screenshot of the book again, to save you scrolling back to the top:

Only one of these books has the right surname length. We actually measured with a ruler on screen, and the ratio of length between the Author names on our mystery book is 2.333. The ratio between Forrest and Reid (in the font on the Penguin edition): 2.3. Given the inaccuracies of measuring on a screen that’s remarkably close.

We found it. The book is Peter Waring by Forrest Reid. 

After watching the relevant section of the video through, with this book in mind, we’re now totally convinced this is the right book. (Please let us know if you can find another candidate!)

But why? Why that book? It’s not like they’d ever mentioned it, as far as we could find, at least. 

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Peter Waring (1937) is a full-scale revision of Reid's earlier Following Darkness (1912) in which Peter, a sensitive boy with literary inclinations, grows up unhappily in the household of his father, a cold village schoolmaster in Newcastle, County Down, and among his Belfast relatives whom he finds intolerable. 

'An acute and subtle story of adolescence. . . . A delicacy and a grave beauty which make their own quiet appeal.' Times 

'Reid has written one of the finest studies of the mental, sexual, spiritual life of the adolescent without ever mentioning the words.' Glasgow Herald

Sound like the family background of anyone we know? (hint: replace father with Aunt)

But, oh wait, it gets better. 

Forrest Reid was a gay man (very repressed by many accounts but seemingly just ace, or the equivalent at the time, by others) who wrote novels about the queer adolescent experience, more emotional than sexual, in the early 1900s. 

He was good friends with EM Forster, another queer writer of his time and other suspected but never confirmed queer writers as well such as Arthur Greaves. His works are not really well known still, and frankly weren’t even well known in the 50s and 60s, except in queer circles, according to our research. 

Perhaps the choice of this specific Reid book is related to one or more of the Peters in their circle? Shotton, Best, Brown, and Asher. That's a lot of Peters!

As we said at the start, in the music video the book appears in a scene depicting the song "Paperback Writer". And you know what fits better than “Lear” in the lyrics of that song? 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look? It's based on a novel by a man named Reid And I need a job So I wanna be a paperback writer Paperback writer

(note: Lear never wrote any novels).

Knowing how they liked plays on words (read, Reid), half rhymes (Reid, be), and internal rhymes (Reid, need) we think it’s very likely the novel in the first draft of the song was by a man named Reid.

Much to think about!