I received a sparkling surprise the other day. A package from Discoverylover! Inside, two books. Right. I need more books. My bookshelves groan under the double-banked load and Mount Toberead towers over my bedside table.

Two very odd books, actually. Fairly slender, they purported to be reproductions of an ongoing correspondence between Griffin, a London artist, and Sabine, a stamp designer on a remote Pacific island nation.

Griffin and Sabine are linked in a very strange and intriguing fashion and the first book is largely concerned with uncovering and exploring this mystery, as well as revealing the two characters, their histories and lives.

In the second book (Sabine’s Notebook), the roles are reversed, with Sabine living in Griffin’s London flat, and Griffin travelling to Sabine’s island chain.

In the third book, who knows what happens? Maybe the mysteries are resolved, maybe they deepen. In fact, there is a second trilogy along the same lines, so obviously there is more to the tale than we discover in the first two books.

Plot aside, the true charm of the books lies in their artistic design. Full of original artworks, little sketches, watercolours, hand-drawn maps and the like, each printed page is a new joy.

The correspondence between the two is reproduced, sometimes reprinted, sometimes as facsimile letters in facsimile envelopes. The two styles of communication are mirrored in the handwriting – Griffin’s tight printing is more restrained than the somewhat more romantic Sabine, who flows a coloured ink calligraphy hand.

Sabine designs the stamps of her tiny nation, and they appear on postcards and envelopes – an idiosyncratic collection largely devoted to island wildlife. I couldn’t help but wonder at the comments Australia would receive if we had such whimsical stamps, but I certainly enjoyed looking at them.

I also enjoyed the letters. It felt quite voyeuristic, opening and reading the mail of others, but realistically, most people’s mail nowadays is bland, computer-printed, and uninteresting. Griffin and Sabine still write (or sometimes hunt-and-peck type) their letters, not to mention the marginal illustrations and diagrams. This is really a cookbook for correspondence – here we are shown delicious examples of how to “plate up” your handcreafted letters.

And of course, the content is utterly fascinating. These are not quite love letters, but they are far more personal than the “like letters” we two write to each other here! We see a shared relationship developing and blossoming, aided by the extraordinary bond between the two. Every letter moves the story onwards, but also opens up tantalising mysteries. Turning a page, opening the envelope, unfolding the letter and reading the private contents – oh, but it is all so delicious!

These books have a feel that is almost unique nowadays. One might describe them as “pop-up books for adults”, with all the attachments and fun of playing with the contents. Novels, even epistolary novels such as The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, don’t go into this tactile detail. Nor the artistic richness of illustration. These books are sensual feasts!

There was more delight in store, as I rummaged through the pages, becoming more drawn into the developing story with each envelope. Discoverylover had written to me on real life postcards! New Zealand postcards, with her own charming handwriting, talking of upcoming festivals and shared pleasures. Not quite the romantic depth of Griffin and Sabine, but welcome and joyful to read.

Not just cards addressed to me. Cards to a mutual friend. The books were registered BookCrossing books (this and that) and I was instructed to send them on, to be returned to Discoverylover after reading.

Well. What could I do? I went out, bought up some postcards – with a sea-life theme to echo Sabine’s own fishy designs – hand-scrawled my own messages on them, added a block of chocolate and popped them in the post!

So these books are not only a sweet and artful correspondence, they are also a real life link between friends.

Just one thing. Discoverylover didn’t manage to find the third in the trilogy in the second-hand shop where she bought these.

I don’t know how the story ends! I so want these two characters to get together, but given the cliff-hanger natures of the first two books, I don’t know if that will ever happen.

I went hunting for the third in the series – The Golden Mean: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Concludes – but when I eventually found a bookshop selling Nick Bantock’s works (quite a hunt, actually; they were shelved under “Art History”!) there were the first two books, and the complete second trilogy, but not the one I wanted! Oh, I could have torn my hair out, if I had any to spare!

One final word. If you want to sample some of the feel of the books, without actually holding the cards and letters in your hands, click on those book links, which will take you to the Amazon pages with their “See Inside” feature, where you can gaze in wonder at the writing and the artwork.

— Skyring

The science of codebreaking and codemaking is usually a subject guaranteed to glaze the eyes of all but the most devoted. Technical details abound and the reader is led through bowels of alphabet soup.

Usually.

Not this time. The codebreakers of WW2 were an eccentric lot, it turns out, all brilliant, many fatally flawed. Leo Marks (son of the bookseller who established the famous 84 Charing Cross Road shop) is no exception.

Brilliant. His book about his wartime service in the Special Operations Executive – charged with devising codes for agents sent to Occupied Europe – is a literal work of genius.

The actual work of code-making and codebreaking is passed over easily enough. There are no long technical passages or pages full of tables, but instead Leo gives the reader the gist of the mechanics without the details. Enough to know that it was hard enough to encrypt a message using paper and pencil and then send it using Morse code, especially if one was in a hurry and the Germans were hunting down unauthorised radio transmissions.

Leo describes how he was interviewed by Special Operations Executive, getting off to a shakey start,

[The interviewer] began by asking what my hobbies were.
“Incunabula and intercourse, sir.”
It slipped out and wasn’t even accurate; I’d had little experience of one and couldn’t afford the other.

He was given a small test – to decode a sample message. He took some time, and the spymaster would look in now and then, sigh and back out. When Leo was finished, he handed over the correctly decoded message and was then asked to return the codebook, prior to being shown out of the building.

“What codebook?”

The official rummaged through the papers on the table and produced a codebook. The test had been for Marks to decode the message using the codebook, a task suitable for one of the female radio operators.

“You aren’t actually using this code in the field?” Marks asked, knowing that if he could break a message in an hour, the Germans could surely do the same in an afternoon.

As it turned out, the codes in operational use by SOE were easily cracked, and from that moment, Leo Marks spent his war coming up with better codes and better ways to use them. He independently invented the uncrackable “one time pad” and his wrinkle was to print them on silk, far more easily concealed in the clothing of an agent than on pads of paper.

He had a deep attachment to the agents sent overseas, often with totally inadequate codes. This is the story of his long hours, days and years spent in helping them and improving the codes. The difference in codes was quite literally between life and death, often with hideous torture intervening. Or, as he put it, between silken codesheets or the cyanide pill carried by agents.

He wasn’t the sort of cog-in-the-machine toe-the-line desk warrior fighting the war from a comfy chair. He bucked the system and was on the constant verge of dismissal or promotion. Unconventional to a fault. Always with one distant eye on agents deep in Occupied Europe, operating with radio sets the size of suitcases, tapping out messages in Morse while German direection-finding vans zeroed in on them.

And his unconventional book is a delight, a joy to read. It is more than well written, it is a work of literature in its own right. Quite simply, it is as brilliant as its author.

But be warned, dear reader. You will need a handkerchief to mop up the tears. Sometimes from laughter, sometimes from sadness. This is a book that will insert probes into the deepest parts of your mind and tickle the emotion centres, sometimes pleasure and pain at once. I can’t really describe it, but this book somehow joins your subconscious mind to the author’s and you share his thoughts in a way that is both intimate and completely natural. I have never met another book that comes close.

There’s enough detail to satisfy those with an interest in codes, the story is well told, it is full of fascinating characters, fraught with tension all the way through, but the joy of reading this book is in the words and sentences. Puns and wordplay abound.

Leo Marks, I wish you had written this book decades ago, and followed it up with many more in the same vein.

It’s not just codes and agents. Leo’s father was Ben Marks, of the famous antiquarian booksellers Marks and Co., immortalised in Helene Hanff’s classic 84, Charing Cross Road.

Marks & Co. were kings of the book ring. They were one of the five leading firms of antiquarian booksellers who never bid against each other in the auction rooms. One member of the ring would be allowed to buy a book for a nominal sum, say £100. As soon as the auction was over the five conspirators would hurry to their nearest safe-house – usually a Lyons tea shop – and conduct a private auction. If one of them bought the book for £500, the £400 profit would be divided in cash amongst the other four. This process was called a ‘knock-out’, and Frank Doel once blew an entire operation.

A famous heart specialist named Evan Bedford instructed him to bid up to £300 for an edition of Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, the earliest printed book on the circulation of the blood, which was coming up for auction at Hodgson’s. Too busy with his own Hartley Street salesroom to attend the auction himself, he telephoned Frank at home late at night demanding to know why the book had been sold to another dealer for £200 when he’d authorized Frank to bid three. Frank confided that it had been sold in the knock-out for £600. The irate physician immediately undertook to have the whole question of the book ring raised in the House of Commons, which caused cardiac arrest amongst its five participants.

Frank, normally discreet, explained later that when the call came, “My wife and I were having a jolly good fuck in front of the fire.” He paused. “And I don’t think too well on my back.”

“The only indecipherable code in the world is a woman,” Leo Marks said. The coding work was actually performed by young women drawn from the “First Aid Nursing Yeomanry” (known as “FANYs”) and it puzzled Leo that periodically his clerks would have days where they would make far more errors than usual. His efforts to find out the reason why are hysterical, but in his own style he found a way to crack that code and to arrange for less important work on those particular days.

He knew that if a message from an agent in the field could not be decoded, it would have to be repeated, a dangerous procedure adding to the risk of detection. He declared that in future there was to be no such thing as an indecipherable message, and led his young women through hours and days of exhaustively trying every combination to find errors in coding.

He ended the practice of giving field agents easily remembered poems or quotations as a basis for their coding. The agents selected five random words from the quote, indicating which ones in a special codegroup at the beginning of the message, and used them to encrypt their text. Given enough text, the Germans could break the code, work out which poem was being used, and then read all subsequent messages with no difficulty at all.

Marks’ solution was to give each agent an original creation, easily remembered, often cheerfully obscene:

Is De Gaulle’s prick
Twelve inches thick?
Can it rise
To the size
Of a proud flag-pole?
And does the sun shine
From his arse-hole?

Unlikely that these verses would be found in any reference work available to the Germans!

He became engaged to the god-daughter of one of his superiors, and when she was killed in a plane crash in Canada, he opened his heart:

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause

For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours
And yours

He later gave this poem to Violette Szabo, who was captured after D-Day, tortured and executed. Her story was told in the film Carve Her Name with Pride, and the poem is read out as a voiceover in the final scene as the screen fades to black.

—Skyring

Resources

• Leo Marks in Wikipedia
• The Englandspiel